Delivering awesome customer experience and high-quality sports gear. Growing an end-to-end South African online retail sports business.

I have used this opportunity as a Montagu franchisee to develop my exposure to consumer retail by building a speciality retail store experience. This presented a number of interesting opportunities, learning paths and a chance to grapple with the hands-on challenges of being a consumer facing brand. The experience has been incredibly rewarding.

My decision to move to the loan product team was motivated by the opportunity to deepen my operational experience, as well as to challenge myself to meaningfully contribute to the shape of African Bank for the future. In this role I was responsible for managing the personal loan product portfolio. This includes overseeing the loan proposition (developing the product to drive overarching bank objectives); managing product operations (end-to-end product offer process); driving the product change process from design to successful integration (new product development and product enhancements); all of which is underpinned by building business relationships, ensuring compliance and most importantly working with and developing a high performing product team (who are good at what they do and can have fun doing it).

This position afforded me great business integration experience, working with the African Bank executive responsible for Strategic Channels. The responsibilities included strategy support to alternative channels & running strategic initiatives for the customer facing areas of business. A few of the key projects include:• Detailed value chain analysis of a key African Bank customer segment and review of our position relative to the opportunities in the market. The recommendations were implemented in the retail operations with success.• Developed and managed the “Front-end scorecard”. This involved the identification and monitoring of performance dimensions of the customer value proposition across front-end departments (marketing; sales; branch; alternative channels; new product development; credit card). Where performance was out of target range, initiatives were implemented to address these.• African Bank underwent a major change in implementation of a new front-end loan origination system. I was responsible for ensuring business readiness of impacted departments across the bank. Business owners were orientated to the change project and assisted in assessing the nature and impact of this change on their respective areas. The Business Readiness Steering committee was established to manage the change milestones and ensure forum for prioritisation and escalation with these stakeholders.• Process cost analysis, which involved detailed review of business costs of the end-to-end African Bank process (from origination through to late-default collections), the recommendations informed capacity building and cost initiatives.• Responsible for the champion-challenger on same-day disbursements, which challenged specific processes, hypothesised to be a hurdle in delivering a superior customer experience. The impact on sales, customer and credit risk performance, as well as secondary, less obvious results were evaluated and integrated into the originations process.

In this role, I was responsible for a broad range of strategy deliverables within the Group Strategy team which involved African Bank and early-stage Ellerines initiatives.Examples of these include:• Retail furniture (and peripheral) industry in-depth competitive analysis, with particular intent to evaluate the Ellerines position and identify opportunities• Successful facilitation of cost optimisation programmes which involved the analysis and identification of initiatives; consultation with cost-centre owners; implementation of actions and monitoring thereof• Extensive brand review of Furniture City, Dial-a-Bed and Beares brands within the Ellerines portfolio. This included in-depth analysis of the elements within the value chain and the approaches to optimise customer retention and profitablility.• Development of a retail furniture market share and customer propensity models• Analytical review of the micro-finance industry, pre-NCA and early stage NCA• Qualitative study of business evolution with regards to consumer orientation to inform the enhancement and integration of the African Bank Consumer Advocates office• End-to-end product and segment reviews to inform Executive committee product decisions• Cost optimisation programmes• International & local case studies and benchmarking• Corporate governance review and proposal

This role was the culmination of my time at Smollan, prior to studying an MBA full-time. I started out at Smollan directly from university and progressed through a few positions in the time there. The experience in this business was an exceptional exposure to operations and gave me an accelerated opportunity to develop my leadership skills. My primary responsibilities were to manage our clients’ tactical research and ad-hoc “quick implementation” needs. This included end-to-end responsibility for research projects (qualitative & quantitative), innovation in data collection systems, data interpretation & insights and managing of a national team of fieldmarketers.