Manager — Strategy & Corporate Development

Yabx | Reporting to the Chief Executive Officer

Location: Gurgaon, Delhi NCR (in-office)

Experience: 2–4 years

Reports to: Chief Executive Officer

Type: Full-time

About Yabx

Yabx builds and runs digital credit businesses in partnership with banks and mobile network operators. We are live in more than 12 African markets, and for many of our customers the loan they take from us is their first formal credit of any kind. We were incubated within Comviva (Tech Mahindra) and closed a Series A this year.

The next two years are about scale: new markets, new products including supply chain lending, and the heavier commercial and governance load that comes with institutional investors on the register.

About the role

This is a generalist business role reporting to the Chief Executive Officer. You will work on the questions that sit outside any one function. Whether to build a product. Whether a market is worth entering. Whether the terms on the table are good ones. Your job is to take those questions to a decision.

The work varies a lot. In a given month you might size a new product line and build the case for it, pull together the research behind a strategic call the leadership team is weighing up, work through commercial terms with a partner bank, and go through a contract before it is signed. The remit is deliberately loose.

Two things to be straight about. First, this is a small team, so you will build your own models and your own slides — there is no one to hand the analysis to. Second, the questions rarely arrive well defined; a good part of the job is working out what is actually being asked before you start.

You will work with the CEO and the leadership team day to day, and your output goes to the board and to our investors. We expect you to be useful at that level within a few months.

How the role splits

Indicative, and it will move around depending on what is live.

Area Share Mostly

Strategy, research and new business lines 40%

Research on demand, feasibility work, and keeping the strategic tracks moving

Business development and partnerships 35%

Business cases in Excel, built with the BD team, and support through commercial terms

Commercial contracting and legal review 15%

Reviewing NDAs and commercial agreements alongside the legal team

Planning and business performance 10%

Supporting the planning cycle and chasing down why a market or product has slipped

What you will own

1. Strategy, research and new business lines — 40%

- Own feasibility studies for new products and markets: problem definition, market sizing, competitor landscape, unit economics, risks, and a recommendation you are willing to argue for.
- Take the business case through leadership review, then rework it once it has been picked apart.
- Turn around research leadership asks for, often at short notice: markets, regulation, competitors, comparable companies, product categories, or the data points needed to build out a strategic track.
- Work from credible public sources — central bank and regulator publications, World Bank and Findex data, GSMA, industry reports, competitor filings, trade press. Every number in your output should trace back to one of them, and you should be able to say why the source is reliable.
- Size opportunities by triangulating across sources and comparable markets — for example,



the addressable opportunity for a card business in Rwanda — and be explicit about what you have assumed and how confident you are.
- Write it up so someone can decide from it: what you found, what it means for us, what you would do.
- Keep a live view of the strategic tracks the company has open — owner, current status, next milestone, what is blocked and on whom. Chase the owners, surface slippage early, and give leadership one place to see where everything stands.
- Work out what execution would actually take: phasing, resourcing, dependencies, and the assumptions the whole plan rests on.

2. Business development and partnerships — 35%

- Build the commercial model underneath a partnership: revenue share, pricing, break-even, sensitivity to portfolio performance, and the assumptions the case rests on.
- Work directly with the business development team to gather commercial inputs, test their assumptions, and get to a number both of you will stand behind.
- Support the structuring of partnerships with banks, mobile operators, payment providers and funders — from the early conversations through to commercial terms.
- Keep a consistent format and set of standards across business cases, so they can be compared to each other and to what was promised later.
- Track the partnership pipeline: what is live, what stage it is at, what it is waiting on, and what it is worth if it closes.

3. Commercial contracting and legal review — 15%

- Work with the legal team to review NDAs, MOUs, LOIs, term sheets and partner and vendor agreements as they come through.
- Find where the commercial risk sits in an agreement — liability, exclusivity, termination, confidentiality carveouts, non-solicit, data, term and survival — and get it resolved before signature.
- Summarise what a document actually commits us to, in plain language, for the people who have to live with it.
- Track the contract pipeline: what is out for review, what is waiting on whom, what is signed and where it is filed.
- Scope — Legal owns drafting and negotiation. You are not expected to do either. You are expected to know enough to spot the clause worth arguing about and raise it.

4. Planning and business performance — 10%

- Support the annual and quarterly planning cycle: work with function heads and market leads on targets, and help build the operating plan.
- Track performance against that plan. When a market or a product slips, find out why and raise it while there is still time to do something about it.
- Pick up the analytical problems no single team owns: pricing calls, incentive design, organisational analysis, one-off diligence.

Core skills The first four are mandatory.

Skill

What we mean by proficient

Structured problem solving

Mandatory. Can break an open-ended business question into a hypothesis-driven structure, decide which analysis actually matters, and reach a defensible answer under time pressure.

Business modelling in Excel

Mandatory. Builds a clean, driver-based model of a business or a deal from a blank sheet. Separated inputs, calculations and outputs; scenarios and sensitivities; no hardcodes buried in formulas.



Comfortable with unit economics and cohort analysis.

PowerPoint and storylining

Mandatory. Builds an investor-grade slide from scratch without a template. Strong grasp of storyline, slide logic, chart selection and visual hierarchy. Fast, and consistent to a house style.

Stakeholder management

Mandatory. Gets what you need from business development, product, credit, finance, ops and legal — people who do not report to you and are busier than you. Sets deadlines, holds them, and escalates only when it is genuinely needed.

Research and source discipline

Finds credible sources quickly using public information, triangulates across them, and is explicit about assumptions, gaps and confidence. Flags where every number came from.

Written communication

Short, direct memos and emails that lead with the answer. A two-pager a busy executive can act on without a follow-up call.

Who we are looking for

Background matters less to us than how you think. There is more than one route into this role.

Required

- 2–4 years at a management consulting firm, in a strategy or transaction advisory practice, in investment banking or corporate finance, or in a strategy, corporate development or business development seat at a high-growth company.
- Qualification — An MBA, CA, CFA Level 2 or above, or a comparable track record in consulting or investment banking. We do not favour one route over another.
- A degree in a discipline that demands analytical rigour: engineering, economics, finance, mathematics or similar.
- A track record of taking loosely defined problems through to an answer, including deciding what the question was in the first place.
- Commercial instinct. You can look at a business and work out quickly where the money is made and what would break it.
- Strong written communication. You can write a two-page memo an executive can act on without a follow-up call.
- Comfort working with incomplete information and with senior people who will push back hard. Weeks here often do not go to plan.
- Discretion with confidential commercial, investor and people matters.

Good to have

- Exposure to financial services, fintech, lending, payments or cards, particularly in emerging markets.
- Experience in Africa, South Asia, LatAm or comparable frontier markets, or a real interest in working on them.
- Experience working with commercial contracts in a business rather than a legal capacity.
- Familiarity with credit portfolio metrics — PAR, roll rates, expected credit loss, collection curves — or card economics: interchange, scheme fees, funding cost, cost per active card.
- Power Query, Power BI, Tableau or SQL.

What you get out of it

- You report to the CEO and work with him daily, on the decisions that set direction.
- Decisions with real commercial consequence, at a company small enough that you can see the result of your own.
- An unusually broad remit for the level: strategy, commercial, partnerships and contracting in one role.
- Exposure to the board and to institutional investors, and the chance to put your own analysis in front of them.
- Work in frontier markets, on credit for people who have not had access to it.
- A robust platform for a top MBA, a strategy or investing role, or a bigger seat here. We will have an honest conversation with you about your timeline.

Yabx is an equal opportunity employer. We hire on ability and judgement, and we welcome applicants from every background.

📌 Management Consultant (Gurugram)
🏢 Yabx
📍 Gurugram