A highly skilled Capability Manager / Technical Product Manager is required to lead the strategy, modernisation, and optimisation of a payments platform. This role combines deep technical expertise with strong product leadership to drive the transition from legacy environments to a cloud‑native, API‑first, modular architecture. The platform transformation enables real‑time, scalable payment capabilities, richer data standards (including ISO 20022), enhanced security, and accelerated innovation.
The role is accountable for owning platform modernisation initiatives end‑to‑end, while ensuring seamless system integration, regulatory compliance, operational resilience, and delivery of measurable business value. The ideal candidate brings strong fintech or banking payments experience, with expertise across key capabilities such as Payment Initiation, Order Management, and Payment Validation, as well as integration with payment schemes and rails including ACH, Mobile Money Operators, and Visa A2A.
Success in this role requires close collaboration with engineering, compliance, operations, and business stakeholders to maintain platform health, enable continuous improvement, and drive innovation at scale.
Define Product Vision and Roadmap Develop and maintain a multi-year product roadmap that prioritises legacy decommissioning, migration to modern architectures (cloud-native, microservices, decoupled from core banking), adoption of ISO 20022 messaging, real-time payment rails, and support for instant/cross-border/embedded finance use cases. Balance short-term stability with long-term transformation goals.
Technical Leadership
Collaborate with engineering to design and implement scalable, API-first systems; define technical requirements for decoupling payment capabilities; drive adoption/roll out of modernised payment capabilities, payment orchestration, and resilient 24/7 processing. Act as SME on modernisation patterns, trade-offs, integration challenges with legacy environments as well be an expert on payment technologies, including reliability, compliance, and performance optimization.
Cross-Functional Collaboration
Partner with engineering, architecture, compliance, risk, and operations to align modernisation efforts, gather requirements for new capabilities, and ensure phased delivery without disrupting current operations. Facilitate seamless user integrations and support daily operations to maintain high service levels.
Compliance and Risk Management:
Embed regulatory compliance (e.g., ISO 20022 mandates, Open Banking/AML/KYC, data privacy) into platform design from the start; lead risk assessments for modernisation changes and enhance fraud/resilience features in the new architecture.
Performance Monitoring and Iteration:
Oversee legacy-to-modern migration metrics, platform health, transaction success rates, and cost/efficiency gains. Use data and user insights to iterate on modernisation priorities and measure ROI.
Stakeholder Communication:
Articulate modernisation strategy, progress, benefits (agility, cost reduction, innovation enablement), and risks to senior leadership, platform users, Vendor, and partners. Position the platform as a competitive differentiator.
Innovation and Strategy:
Contribute to or set strategic directions for payment capabilities. Champion emerging trends (real-time payments at scale, AI-driven orchestration, stablecoins/interoperability) to future-proof the platform and enable new revenue streams.
Qualification requirements
Bachelor's degree in computer science, Engineering, Business, Finance, or a related field will be preferred.
Certification in product management or payment will be an advantage
Experience
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Take note that applications will not be accepted on the below date and onwards, kindly submit applications ahead of the closing date indicated below.
09/06/26
All appointments will be made in line with FirstRand Group’s Employment Equity plan. The Bank supports the recruitment and advancement of individuals with disabilities. In order for us to fulfill this purpose, candidates can disclose their disability information on a voluntary basis. The Bank will keep this information confidential unless we are required by law to disclose this information to other parties.
The FirstRand Corporate Centre houses many of the critical functions required by a large and complex financial services group. The Corporate Centre’s stakeholders are external, such as regulators, shareholders, global developmental institutions and government; and also internal, mainly the market-leading businesses that service the group’s customers. These critical functions cover risk, compliance, governance, internal audit, treasury, finance and tax amongst many others. They require deep specialist and technical skills and ultimately represent the custodianship of the FirstRand group’s licence to operate.
Employees of the Corporate Centre develop a very unique perspective of the group because nowhere else can you own or be part of a mandate that operates across the portfolio. This allows for both big picture thinking and operational learning. It is also a great place to drive collaboration and a place to have a significant impact.
The Corporate Centre has adopted a blended approach to working, with a focus on balancing remote working and connections with colleagues in the workplace. Face-to-face interactions remain important to its way of working as these connections protect the business’s social capital, which is key to ensuring that FirstRand’s unique culture stays alive and continues to thrive.
