Fraud Manager

Meet Ozow

Ozow is a leading fintech company redefining digital payments in South Africa and beyond. We make payments more accessible, secure, and convenient for businesses and consumers alike. As a fast-growing player in financial technology, we foster a culture of innovation, diversity, and inclusivity, and we are committed to making a positive impact through our payment solutions.

About the role

As our Fraud Manager, you will protect Ozow, its merchants, and their customers from financial crime and fraud-related losses. Leading a high-performing fraud team, you will define and execute our fraud prevention and detection strategy across EFT, card, and emerging payment methods, using data, automation, and strong industry relationships to catch fraud early without adding friction for legitimate transactions. It is a role for someone who moves fast without losing precision.

Your role and responsibilities

You will work closely with the Fraud Strategy Lead on strategy, rules, risk appetite, and the fraud technology roadmap, and partner across Risk, Compliance, Legal, Commercial, FinOps, Product, Engineering, and Data.

Leadership & team

• Lead and develop a high-performing Fraud Operations team, fostering accountability, innovation, and continuous improvement through coaching, regular performance reviews, and development planning.

• Own team resourcing and capacity planning, including shift scheduling, overtime, and after-hours or weekend coverage, against alert and investigation volumes.

• Act as the internal fraud subject-matter expert, guiding fraud operations and controls and engaging banking partners on fraud-related matters.

• Own fraud rule design, risk appetite recommendations, and vendor relationships for the fraud function.

• Partner with merchants' fraud and risk teams to exchange typology intelligence and coordinate joint mitigation.

Fraud strategy & risk

• Translate Ozow's fraud strategy into operational execution, aligned to business growth objectives.

• Continuously assess emerging fraud threats, trends, and attack vectors, and define and monitor the key risk indicators that inform fraud risk appetite.

• Provide fraud risk input into new products and payment methods ahead of launch.

• Build relationships with industry bodies and fraud intelligence-sharing networks to strengthen threat awareness.

Detection, prevention & response

• Reduce fraud losses across EFT, card, and other payment methods while protecting approval rates, investigating trends and patterns to identify emerging loss drivers.

• Drive fraud rule performance through continuous back-testing, tuning, and retirement of rules based on live catch-rate and false-positive results.

• Strengthen detection beyond rule logic, including case-management tooling, entity-level controls such as blocklists and watchlists, and monitoring and control infrastructure.

• Identify vulnerabilities and recommend preventative measures across consumer- and merchant-facing typologies, including merchant-side signals such as volume or value deviation, dormant reactivation, and scam-driven activity.

• Oversee investigations, root-cause analysis, and remediation, and lead incident response for fraud events across the relevant teams.

• Conduct regular fraud risk assessments and control-effectiveness reviews.

Analytics, reporting & AI

• Produce actionable fraud reporting for executive stakeholders, measuring KPIs such as fraud losses, false positives, capture rates, and operational efficiency.

• Analyse fraud data to surface structured insight and proactive-intervention opportunities beyond day-to-day rule tuning.

• Partner with Data and Product to improve fraud models and risk-based decision-making, applying machine-learning risk-scoring outputs to inform rule and decisioning strategy.

• Automate manual review and investigation workflows, and pilot and operationalise AI-driven tools, improving efficiency without compromising detection quality.

Regulatory compliance, governance & tooling

• Ensure adherence to applicable regulatory requirements, scheme rules, and internal policies.

• Equip and train the team to identify and escalate suspicious activity and file Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) in line with FIC Act obligations, working with Legal and Compliance.

• Support audits, compliance reviews, and regulatory engagements relating to fraud.

• Develop and maintain fraud policies, procedures, reporting frameworks, and governance documentation, and drive fraud-awareness education across the organisation.

• Identify fraud technology and tooling needs, and lead adoption of new tools and processes, including training, change management, and stakeholder buy-in.

You are an ideal candidate if you have

Essential

• 3 to 5 years leading and developing high-performing teams in a fraud, risk, financial crime, or operations environment, including shift-based or extended-hours coverage.

• Proven experience designing and implementing fraud prevention, detection, and investigation controls in a high-growth environment.

• A track record managing fraud losses, risk controls, and operational fraud performance metrics.

• Experience partnering across Risk, Compliance, Legal, Commercial, FinOps, Product, Engineering, and Data to deliver fraud mitigation.

• Experience managing vendor or external platform relationships in a fraud, risk, or technology context.

• Experience presenting fraud trends, insights, and recommendations to senior leadership and executive stakeholders.

• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with data-driven decision-making.

• Experience with fraud monitoring, transaction monitoring, case-management, and rule-based decisioning tools, plus BI and analytics tools such as Power BI or Looker.

Advantageous

• Familiarity with the South African payments regulatory environment (FIC Act, POPIA, PASA/SARB oversight).

• Professional certifications such as CFE, CAMS, or CFCS, or equivalent.

• SQL and data-querying proficiency, and a working understanding of machine-learning concepts applied to fraud or risk scoring.