Financial Controller

About the role: We are seeking an experienced Global Financial Controller to lead our accounting and financial control activities across multiple international entities in a fast-scaling, cross-border lending business. You will own the integrity of our financial reporting, including the accounting for a growing, multi-currency loan book - while strengthening controls, supporting audits, and driving finance transformation as the business expands. This is a hands-on leadership role that demands deep technical accounting expertise, real fluency in loan book and financial-instrument accounting, and the resilience to bring order and structure to a high-growth environment that doesn't always come with a roadmap. Key responsibilities: • Lead the global month-end, quarter-end, and year-end close processes across multiple jurisdictions. • Ensure accurate, timely, and compliant financial reporting under applicable accounting standards (IFRS / local GAAP), with particular rigour around financial instruments and loan portfolio accounting. • Own the accounting for the loan book end to end, interest income recognition under the effective interest rate method, fee deferral, loan origination accounting, modifications, and derecognition. • Own expected credit loss provisioning under IFRS 9, staging, model inputs and assumptions, governance of the ECL process, and clear articulation of movements to auditors and management. • Manage and develop a small international finance team, fostering a culture of accountability, ownership, and continuous improvement. • Own the global audit process and coordinate relationships with external auditors, tax advisors, and regulatory bodies. • Strengthen financial controls, governance frameworks, and risk management practices across the organisation. • Oversee balance sheet integrity, reconciliations and accounting policy compliance. • Support lender and debt-facility reporting, covenant compliance, and reconciliations between operational lending systems and the financial ledger. • Partner closely with FP&A, Tax, Treasury, Credit/Risk, Legal, and business leaders to support strategic decision-making. • Drive process improvement, automation, and finance transformation initiatives to enhance scalability and efficiency. • Support M&A, integration projects, and corporate restructuring activities where required. • Ensure compliance with local statutory, tax, and regulatory requirements across all operating entities. Qualifications and Experience: • Bachelor's degree in Accounting, Finance, or a related discipline. • Professional accounting qualification (CPA, ACA, ACCA, CA or equivalent). • 8–12+ years of progressive finance and controllership experience. • Prior experience in lending, consumer/SME credit, fintech lending, banking, or another financial-services environment where loan book accounting is core. • Experience managing multi-entity, multi-currency international operations. • Previous experience leading financial audits and working with external auditors, including defending technical judgements. • Experience managing and developing finance teams. • Comfortable working in Google Sheets, Oracle ERP Experience. • Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills. Who You Are This role is built for someone who is energised by building, not just maintaining. You will fit in well if you are: • A self-starter who sees what needs doing and gets on with it, without waiting to be told. • Comfortable in the chaos, you can walk into ambiguity, untangle it, and figure things out where there's no playbook yet. • Highly motivated and driven, with a strong personal standard for getting things right. • A positive, can-do thinker who keeps the team steady and focused when things get intense. Company overview: Ezra provides B2B digital lending solutions for emerging markets in partnership with mobile and digital wallet operators and financial service providers. Ezra supports 24 operations in 23 countries, across Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Our key office locations are in Nairobi, Kenya and Dubai, UAE. Our flagship products are Airtime Credit Services (ACS), Nano and BNPL. • ACS is an airtime or data advance offered to prepaid mobile subscribers at the point of low credit. • Nano is a micro cash advance offered to mobile wallet users on demand. • BNPL facilitates payment installments for products and services As a FinTech company, our business is entirely technology and data driven, from determining subscriber eligibility, generating relevant offers, managing risk, loan issuance, recovery, optimizing performance and reporting, reconciliation and billing. Each day we process approximately 21M loan requests and 1.4 TB of data across our markets. This process needs to be robust, reliable and secure. But it doesn’t end there. We’re exploring new ways of using our platform and transactional data to improve our products and develop new product opportunities.