Chief Operating Officer
Location: In office in Cape Town, South Africa, with the option to be Hybrid
About Peach Payments
Peach Payments is one of Africa’s leading payment orchestration platforms. We enable enterprise and SME merchants across the continent to accept, manage and reconcile digital payments through a single integration - across cards, mobile money, wallets, EFT, BNPL and bank rails.
We power digital commerce for some of Africa’s most loved brands, including Travelstart, Superbalist, Mukuru, Netflorist, Digicape, and My Runway, alongside thousands of growing businesses building their future online.
Today we operate as a locally regulated business in 11 countries - South Africa, Kenya, Mauritius, Eswatini, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, Benin, Burkina Faso, Mali, Togo and Cameroon - with a team of around 200 Peachies. Operating locally means obtaining and maintaining licences in each market, building deep relationships with central banks and regulators, and standing behind every payment with our own balance sheet, controls and compliance.
Mission: Why This Role Exists
The Chief Operating Officer (COO) is a key member of the Executive Committee, reporting to the CEO. As Peach scales across Africa, the COO is the executive accountable for running the company operations day to day - ensuring that our merchants experience a service that is fast, reliable, secure and locally compliant in every market we operate in.
The COO will lead the operational backbone of Peach Payments: customer operations, maintain and adhering to license requirements across our markets, anti-money laundering and MLRO oversight, fraud and risk management and operational resilience. The role partners closely with the MD Africa (who owns the commercial agenda - Sales, Marketing, Partnerships and Country Managers) and the Chief Product Officer (who owns Product, Engineering and Production Infrastructure) to translate strategy into execution. The COO works closely with the MLRO (who reports to the General Counsel) to ensure that AML/CFT policies are operationalised effectively across all markets, and escalates operational financial crime issues through the appropriate channel.
This is a builder’s role. We are at the stage where structures, systems and standards put in place over the next three years will define what kind of pan-African business Peach becomes. We’re looking for a leader who is equally comfortable operating in an ExCo, sitting opposite a key merchant or the local regulator, and being on the floor with a customer service team solving for a merchant.
Reporting Lines & Scope
- Reports To: Chief Executive Officer (sits on Exco and participates in Board discussions)
- Location: Cape Town, South Africa
- Direct Reports: Approximately 60–80 people across operations, compliance, risk and people functions, with a leadership team of 5–7 senior managers reporting directly to the COO.
- Functional scope: Customer Operations (pre-sales solutions, merchant onboarding, technical integration via Application Engineering, after-sales support), Operational Compliance Execution, AML/CFT Control Implementation (operational execution only - policy-setting and MLRO oversight reside with the General Counsel), Risk & Fraud, Business Continuity & Operational Resilience. Note: Licensing strategy and Corporate Compliance policy-setting reside with the Legal/General Counsel function.
Responsibilities
A. Customer Success & Merchant Onboarding
- Drive significant improvements in the merchant journey, ensuring industry-leading speed for KYC/KYB, due diligence, documentation, contracting and go-live readiness across all 11 markets.
- Deliver merchant-grade service across the full lifecycle, from pre-sales solution support (technical scoping, payment-method selection and proposal support) to after-sales support (incident response, day-to-day query resolution, dispute and chargeback handling, and continuous account health).
- Set, measure, and continuously improve service standards including onboarding time-to-live, integration time-to-first-transaction, ticket SLAs, CSAT, NPS, first-contact resolution and merchant churn linked to operational issues.
- Build a customer operations function that scales sub-linearly with revenue—leveraging tooling, self-service, automation and AI to keep cost-to-serve trending down as the merchant base grows.
- Make Peach famous for being the easiest payments partner to integrate with and the most responsive when something goes wrong.
B. Operational Resilience & Payment Operations
- Own the merchant-facing side of incident response — communications, escalations, and accountability when something goes wrong on the platform — working hand-in-glove with the CPO who owns the engineering response.
- Build and rehearse business continuity, disaster recovery and crisis management capabilities across all 11 markets.
- Drive a culture of post-incident learning - blameless reviews, RCA, follow-through on corrective actions, and ExCo visibility on operational health.
- Partner with the CFO and Finance team on settlement, reconciliation and scheme/bank operational relationships — currently shared scope between Operations and Finance.
- As Peach scales, work with the CFO and CEO to define the long-term home for Payment Operations and to ensure end-to-end ownership of the merchant money flow — from authorisation to settlement to payout — with clear SLAs, controls and reporting.
C. Risk & Fraud Management
- Lead the Risk function that protects Peach, its merchants and end-consumers from transactional fraud, merchant fraud and operational losses.
- Own Peach’s fraud risk strategy — rules, models, scoring, manual review, chargeback management and recoveries — in partnership with Product on tooling and CPO on engineering capacity.
- Set and monitor risk appetite by market, channel and merchant segment; ensure pricing of risk into commercial decisions in partnership with the MD Africa and CFO.
- Operate a robust enterprise risk management framework covering operational, vendor, regulatory, financial crime and reputational risk — with clear KRIs, risk registers and ExCo / Board reporting.
Competencies: What You Bring
- A seasoned executive — a Chief Operating Officer or equivalent C-level operator at a fintech, payments, banking or regulated financial services business, ideally with multi-country African experience, looking for an opportunity to operate at real scale and impact;
We care about more than years of experience in the demonstrated ability to build, scale and run a regulated, multi-country operating organisation.
Required experience
- Demonstrated senior operational leadership experience (typically 12+ years total, with at least 5+ years in C-level or senior leadership roles).
- Direct experience in payments, fintech, banking or another regulated financial services business — with a working knowledge of card schemes, mobile money, EFT/bank rails and the regulatory environment in at least one African market.
- Proven track record of leading multi-country operations in Africa or another comparable emerging-market geography.
- Hands-on experience with regulators — licensing, ongoing supervision, regulatory examinations, and managing regulatory change.
- Experience leading customer-facing operations at scale (50+ people) where service quality directly drives commercial outcomes.
- Track record of building, motivating and retaining high-performing leadership teams in a distributed, multi-country, multi-cultural environment.
Preferred experience
- Experience scaling an operations organisation through a period of rapid growth, market expansion or post-investment scale-up.
- Experience operating across both Anglophone and Francophone Africa.
- Exposure to enterprise merchant relationships in e-commerce, travel, retail, mobility or remittances.
- Experience leading or significantly participating in M&A integration of operational teams across geographies.
Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree (Business, Finance, Engineering, Computer Science, Law or related field).
- MBA or relevant postgraduate qualification preferred but not required.
Skills & Competencies
Operating skills
- Operating cadences — designing and running effective ExCo, business review, ops review and incident review forums.
- Data fluency — ability to interrogate operational, compliance, and risk data and turn it into decisions.
- Process design — ability to build and continually improve scalable processes, with a strong bias to automation and AI-leverage.
Domain skills
- Solid working knowledge of African payments, regulators, scheme dynamics, mobile money ecosystems and bank rails.
- Strong grasp of AML, fraud, financial crime and operational risk frameworks, focusing on the operational implementation of policies set by Legal.
- Comfortable representing the company to regulators, central banks, auditors and key partners in an operational capacity.
Leadership skills
- Strong communicator - in writing, in person, in board rooms and on the floor with operations and customer-facing teams.
- Ability to build trust and consensus across functions - particularly with MD Africa, CFO and CPO peers.
- Comfortable being held to specific, measurable outcomes.
- Builder’s mindset. Genuinely energised by going from “good enough” to “best in class”, and willing to roll up sleeves where needed.
- Customer obsession. Believes that what we do for merchants is the point, not a means to an end.
- Operational humility. No task is too small; no detail is beneath an executive.
- Resilient under pressure. Stays calm in incidents, comfortable making decisions with imperfect information.
- High integrity. Holds the line on compliance, financial crime and risk — even under commercial pressure.
- Pan-African mindset. Genuine curiosity about, and respect for, the diverse markets and cultures we operate in.
- Long-term thinker. Building a business that should outlast the current leadership team.
Location & Travel
We are open to candidates based in:
- South Africa (our headquarters and largest operating market);
- Hybrid solutions will be considered for exceptional candidates
Whichever arrangement applies, the COO should expect meaningful, recurring time on the ground in our key markets and with our local teams.
Why Peach
Peach is at an inflection point. We have built a real business in Africa’s largest market, expanded to 11 countries, and earned the trust of some of the continent’s most loved consumer brands. The next chapter is about scale: more markets, more merchants, more transactions, more responsibility.
We are looking for a Chief Operating Officer who wants to help us write that chapter — someone who will leave Peach measurably stronger, more compliant, more efficient, and more loved by its merchants than they found it.
If that sounds like you, we’d love to talk.
