Senior Commercial Analyst at Mukuru

The Senior Commercial Analyst role is embedded in the Commercial team and reports into the Chief Commercial Officer (CCO). In this role, you will collaborate cross functionally to understand business problems and then build data driven solutions to solve them, having the opportunity to work across full spectrum of descriptive, diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive analytics. The role will be responsible for determining and effecting the most efficient competitive pricing strategies in aggregate across a suite of products and geographies, to gain market share and achieve business goals.

Internal liaison takes place with all internal departments. External liaison takes place with third parties, as required.

Duties and Responsibilities (include but not limited to):

• Manage a team, including a Commercial Analyst and Commercial Administrator.
• To succeed in the role requires a self-starter work ethic, taking responsibility for initiatives.
• Work closely with stakeholders across all levels and business areas to elicit analysis requirements pertaining to group Pricing.
• Translate requirements into reporting or analysis specifications employing critical thinking to ensure alignment with the actual business need and impact thereof.
• Specify, gather, clean, combine and aggregate data from disparate sources for analysis and reporting needs. Specific focus is on managing formal and informal competitor pricing data to keep abreast of competitor positioning across multiple territories.
• Profile and validate all data intended for use in reporting or analysis to ensure high data quality (accuracy, completeness, missing/invalid data correction, timeliness).
• Perform analysis to (not exhaustive):
• Extract key insights and observations to influence/support business decisions and actions
• Identify the core drivers/levers and segments that influence the movement of key metrics/KPIs
• Identify gaps in existing business processes and product offerings and formulate recommendations to improve them
• Measure the effectiveness of product launches and new business initiatives against budgets and forecasts
• Design, build, and maintain reports to track and communicate KPIs and results from analysis activities. Specific focus on P&L reporting across various corridors and direct engagement with the FP&A team.
• Build data visualizations to improve access and visibility into the content from all key reports and our data in general.
• Share insights and analysis results in written form and in business presentations.
• Train and support user community in the use of reports, BI tools, and the interpretation of analysis results.
• Collect and apply feedback from business presentations, user training and peer review to continuously improve reporting and analysis solutions.
• Proactively communicate the status (including blockers, risks, issues) and roadmap of the work assigned to you, with all affected stakeholders.
• Cultivate relationships and collaborate cross-functionally to shape, support, and execute on business and product goals.
• Help define and improve upon our analytics standards through participation within the community of practice, conducting peer reviews and contribution to internal documentation.
• Identify data quality issues, their corresponding root cause and collaborate with business, product, and data teams to drive improvements in data hygiene.
• Continuously upskill and stay abreast of new developments in Analysis & BI tools, methodologies, and applications. In addition, coding for automation of processes/functions to streamline efficiency.

Key Requirements:

• Grade 12 or equivalent (Essential).
• Tertiary qualification in a quantitative field (includes but not limited to – Mathematics, Statistics, Engineering, Computer Science, Actuarial Science, Economics, Finance, Business Analytics).
• Professional qualification: CFA, CA(SA), CIMA.
• 5-10 years working experience, preferably within Financial Services or FX markets or high growth businesses.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills in English and understand how to share insights and analytical results to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Experience working with stakeholders to gather Analysis requirements and communicate findings.
• Experience developing reports/dashboards with modern BI tools (e.g., Power BI, Tableau, Qlik).
• Experience cleaning, assimilating, manipulating, and aggregating large data sets using Excel Power Query, SQL, R, Python or similar tools.
• Advanced Excel skills, including VBA macros.
• Knowledge of data analysis techniques, such as time series analysis, scenario analysis, clustering & segmentation, regression, decision trees, forecasting, and interpretation & creation of probability distributions (proficiency in a few of these will suffice)
• Analytical and problem-solving skills.
• Execution-oriented, and able to complete tasks independently.
• Coding experience: JavaScript, Python.
• Experience managing a team.

Additional Skills/Experience:

• Teamworking and collaboration.
• Excellent organisational skills with ability to juggle many tasks without losing sight of the highest priority items and able to stay focused under pressure.
• Passionate about knowledge sharing.
• Attention to detail.