Financial Sector & Innovation Consultant, Finb Lazio

Financial Sector & Innovation Consultant, Finb
Roma
Lazio, Lazio

Selection of staff is made on a competitive basis, and we are committed to promoting diversity and gender balance.

**Job Title**:Financial Sector & Innovation Consultant

**Type of Contract**: When Actually Employed (WAE) Consultant, up to 21 days per month

**Division**:Business Development Cash-Based Transfers (CBT) Unit, FINB

**Duty Station**: WFP Headquarters, Rome, Italy, working remotely from current place of residence

**Duration**:11 months

**BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE OF THE ASSIGNMENT**:

Cash-based transfers (CBT) represent an increasing share of WFP's total humanitarian assistance (38 percent in 2020), and include assistance distributed as physical banknotes, e-money, mobile money, vouchers or debit cards.

In 2020, WFP transferred US$2. 1 billion to 27. 9 million people in 64 countries, empowering them to meet their essential needs.

In support of WFP's global scale up of cash-based transfers, the Finance function through the Business Development and Cash Based Transfers Branch (FINB) is developing corporate tools and guidance, providing day-to-day technical advice and assistance to Country Offices (CO) while also undertaking a range of other strategic activities and engagements internally as well as with external service providers.

The consultant will be supporting the development and enhancement of corporate tools and guidance, and provide strategic advice based on market intelligence and financial technology insights to the Financial Sector intelligence and Innovation team within FINB.

The consultant will be supporting Country Offices and Regional Bureaux with rollout, guidance and tool enhancement for completion of the mandatory Financial Assessments and work on Innovation projects for CBT.

**ACCOUNTABILITIES/RESPONSIBILITIES**:

The Consultant will undertake the following tasks:

- Roll-out management for pilot implementation of PlugPAY for CBT.

PlugPAY is a novel digital payment solution for beneficiaries to rapidly receive cash assistance through their payment instrument of choice.

a.

Enable COs for beneficiary centered implementation of plugPAY operations in joint collaboration with all relevant cross functional stakeholders and project team members at CO, RB and HQ level to foster financial inclusion in CBT.

b.

Support planning and prioritization of all workstreams related to the roll-out, develop rollout strategy and prepare guidance documents.

c.

Collaborate with plugPAY stakeholders at CO, RB and HQ level as focal point to streamline implementation, plan payment schedules, guide payment initiation, monitor system reliability and engage for troubleshooting during payouts.

d.

Provide CBT finance expert advice to plan and enable CO in finance related aspects of plugPAY implementation, payment initiation and accounting requirements.

e.

Align with external Financial Service Providers for plugPAY service delivery, monitor and assess their performance and steer collaboration forums per country.

f.

Contribute to policy, system and process updates in order to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of operations and minimize risk.

- Advance novel beneficiary-centred WFP payment solution project PlugPAY for CBT.

a.

Support strategic project planning, including preparation of management communication materials, approval requests and Decision Memoranda, business case drafting, timeline development, country rollout planning and other duties as required.

b.

Design and facilitate implementation of MVP process automation, including drafting of business requirements for short term MVP solution based on SCOPE, WINGS and other systems, sparring with TEC and FIN stakeholders.

c.

Contribute learnings from CO solution implementation to enhance the solution and plan next steps, provide recommendations for technical, accounting and operations related improvements (incl.

E2E process and accounting model updates).

e.

Document plugPAY standard process for implementation and payment initiation as input for plugPAY manual.

- Guide finalization of the global baseline study on global FinTech solutions for humanitarian cash transfers and national payment infrastructures to provide insights for CBT.

a.

Evaluate national payment infrastructures, regulatory requirements and available FinTech service providers, to provide insights on country and FSP rosters for CBT implementation.

b.

Evaluate the opportunities and risks for WFP to engage or partner with FinTech players and payment aggregators for CBT implementation.

c.

Establish cross functional working group to design and agree on WFP's FinTech and Aggregator agenda to set direction for policy development to enable FinTech use for CBT while mitigating risks in respect to country regulatory frameworks.

d.

Guide and instruct an intern for research, data analysis and work for completion of the baseline study with emphasize on global Mobile Money and FinTech landscape.

e.

Discuss strategic partnership potentials based on the FinTech study within FIN