Tokenization Specialist

Location: Nairobi, Kenya (On-site)
Duration: 12 Months

Description:

Please apply only if you are based in Kenya, or eligible to work onsite in Nairobi, and available to work at the client's site for a 12-month engagement.

We are hiring a Tokenization Specialist to work on a project for one of our clients, a leading bank. This is a senior delivery lead role: you will drive the end-to-end implementation and launch of the bank's digital-wallet and card-tokenization capabilities, acting as the central coordination point across the bank, its processors, the card scheme, and the wallet providers.

This is a hands-on-with-the-technical-detail role, not a pure project-admin one. You will need to understand tokenization and wallet integration well enough to sit in a room with technical teams, read an API spec, and drive a certification or a defect to resolution — while still owning timelines, risks, and go-to-market.

We are looking for someone with 10+ years in payments, with strong card-issuing and digital-payments exposure.

The work itself

Delivery ownership is the core. You will lead the tokenization rollout end to end — on time and on budget — driving the issuer wallet-enablement programme and managing timelines, risks, dependencies, and milestones the whole way through.

You will be the coordination hub. You will act as the primary link between the bank's business, IT, operations, and marketing teams, the processor and third-party providers, and the card scheme's implementation and product teams, keeping a genuinely multi-party delivery aligned.

On the technical enablement side, you will bring tokenization services live across network token services (MDES or equivalent), local token service providers, and Apple Pay and Google Pay integrations, including domestic proprietary-card tokenization — and make sure the bank is ready across contactless, e-commerce gateway, digital-wallet, and issuer-platform environments.

You will support go-to-market: working with marketing and product on launch, feeding into customer-experience and adoption strategy, and lending subject-matter expertise on tokenization and payments infrastructure to the wider digital and e-commerce agenda.

And you will own the performance read after launch. You will track provisioning outcomes, authorization approval rates, decline drivers, and tokenized-versus-non-tokenized performance, and use those insights to find configuration, authentication, routing, or risk-rule gaps and coordinate the fixes with the bank, processor, scheme, and wallet-provider teams.

What you need to have
Mandatory:

• Based in Kenya, or eligible to work onsite in Nairobi
• 10+ years in payments, with strong exposure to card issuing and digital payments
• A proven track record delivering payments implementation and program management
• Hands-on experience with tokenization and wallet integrations
• Strong grasp of API-based integrations — including network tokenization APIs (MDES pre-digitization, lifecycle, and customer-service APIs), wallet-provider APIs, and authentication flows — enough to interpret specs, validate payloads, coordinate connectivity and key exchange, support sandbox and production testing, and troubleshoot message-level defects with technical teams
• Demonstrable experience measuring and improving digital-payment performance using approval rates, provisioning success, activation completion, and decline-code analysis
• Fluency in English

Preferred:

• Experience within the Kenyan payments ecosystem
• A relevant degree (required by the client) and a PMP, PRINCE2, or equivalent certification
• Swahili language ability

The kind of person we want

You should be equally credible on delivery and on technical detail — able to hold a program plan together across four or five external parties, and able to get into an API specification and a decline-code analysis without handing it off. You should understand the card-tokenization and digital-wallet landscape deeply, and you should be comfortable being the person everyone looks to when a multi-party integration isn't behaving.

What success looks like

• Tokenization delivered on time and on budget, with quality and operational readiness that hold up at launch
• Risks surfaced early and mitigated, not discovered late
• Improving tokenized-transaction approval rates and fewer avoidable declines after launch
• Timely, clear performance reporting across provisioning, activation, approval rates, and decline reasons
• Stakeholders across the bank, processor, scheme, and wallet providers kept aligned and engaged