Head of IT Architecture

Job Description**:
WHAT WE NEED**
HEAD OF IT ARCHITECTURE

**WHO WE ARE?**
We’re an innovative technology company with strong ties to the financial industry. Innovating bank interoperability since 1972, supporting the growth of the South African Economy and individuals across the continent, is what we excel at. Continuously striving for financial inclusion and providing everyone with access to the digital economy.

**WHAT WE DO**
Access to financial Inclusion ensures individual growth and economic growth - securing the growth of the African nation. We have served this noble purpose for five decades across the African Continent and our growth spurs us on to do more, give more and include more.

We are firm believers in our people and the Adaptability Quotient (AQ) inherent in each of us that makes us strive to thrive. BankservAfrica has a high AQ and it is this quality that has driven our business to continuously innovate and evolve, building capability and capacity to include more, enabling there to access to the country’s financial landscape.

We provide skills, development opportunities and leadership support to our people so that they can hone their skills to do more and give more in support of each other, our clients, and our communities in a supportive, yet performance driven, environment.

**WHERE WE'RE GOING**
The payments landscape is being modernised globally and, therefore, ours is an exciting industry to be part of. New technologies are the main thrust driving this change. Technology enables the possibilities and people’s ingenuity creates opportunities.

As an enabler, our future are orchestrated around assembling a central payments environment that actively seeks and acquires strategic partners to enable service extensions. The core of our Financial Services Platform is a fully interoperable, cloud-ready composite platform delivering real-time value transfer and settlement, enhanced by a range of valueadded services.

**The platform will leverage technological advancements aimed at**:
Managing complex volumes
Faster deployment and faster change
Personalised user experiences, with standardised platform experiences being the norm

Doing more will be realised through our creation of platform extension partners who will benefit from our standardised API capability which they in turn can offer to their clients, giving more. We aim to include new Market Actors through our value chain extension which will allow ‘pass-through’ connection in those cases where an existing actor passes services through a new actor enabling them to give more to the ecosystem without compromising the security or the role of the heavily regulated financial institutions.

**WHAT YOU’LL DO**
You will be joining the ICT business at BankservAfrica where you will work in close collaboration with the CIO, providing strategic directional leadership in terms of architecture and IT trends and IT impact on the organisations current and future state TOM, target enterprise architecture and the IT strategy with the collaboration of all relevant stakeholders across the business and IT.

Your role will require you to focus on defining, implementing and aligning a range of enterprise architecture capabilities and services that will support the business and IT strategies.

As the custodian of the enterprise architecture governance, performance management processes, including the setting of enterprise architecture principles and policies, frameworks, methodologies, standards, the meta repository constructs - you will be responsible for ensuring enterprise architecture training and development forms part of the architecture teams personal learning, growth objectives as well as performance contracting and reward.

**Key stakeholders include but are not limited to**:
**Internal and External Stakeholders**
Internal management and senior technology stakeholders
External partnership stakeholders
Business teams
Domain architects
Solution architects
Technology architects
Security interfaces
Group Strategy Office
PMO
IT Leadership and SME’S
**Vendors**
Strategic IT, Research groups and Enterprise Architecure industry partners
Regulatory Bodies
Internal governance bodies such as ARB, EDA, CAB, etc.
BankservAfrica Executive and Senior Management forums
BankservAfrica policy and strategy making bodies

**Qualification/Knowledge (including most relevant field of study)**
BCom or BSc Informatics; Business Analysis Diploma; other similar qualifications
Financial services and/or banking industry qualifications/certifications, beneficial
Required computer literacy levels

**Experience (including relevant sector specific experience)**
**Industry and IT Management experience**
Over 10 years’ experience in a relevant IT Management position working across a complex environment, with at least 7 years in the financial services sector and 5 years in the banking/payments industry.
Must have operated at enterprise level IT (across 5+ business units)
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