Chief Operating Officer

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 and risk 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 t