David Wambaire

I've spent the last four years building payments products across East Africa — everything from RTGS and EFT enhancements to government-to-person disbursement platforms.

I sit closest to engineering when it matters: translating dense bank integration specs into clear requirements, managing exception flows nobody wants to think about until they break, and making sure reconciliation actually closes. I've shipped in regulated, multi-market environments with real external dependencies — central banks, PSPs, third-party middleware — and I'm comfortable holding the delivery accountability when those partnerships get complicated.

Senior Product Manager — Payments & Wallets - Equity Group Holdings Plc - Nairobi, Kenya · 6 markets

(2025-01)

• Led end-to-end delivery of SWIFT Local, RTGS STP/NSTP, and EFT enhancements — owned the full lifecycle from spec translation to production go-live, including acknowledgement flows, status reporting, and exception handling.
• Drove reconciliation automation that cut turnaround time by 35% — scoped the failure modes first (duplicate messages, delayed ACKs, break scenarios), then defined the system logic with engineering before a line of code was written.
• Delivered Postbank Uganda Wendi Wallet B2B integration — managed the full partner lifecycle across government, regulatory, and technical stakeholders for a high-stakes government-to-person disbursement product.
• Shipped TIPS Real-Time Transfer in Tanzania in partnership with the Bank of Tanzania — navigated central bank compliance dependencies and third-party middleware constraints to hit delivery timelines.
• Deployed Pesalink failover mechanism reducing interbank failure rates — designed the unhappy path logic before defining the success criteria, which is the only way that one makes sense to build.
• Launched CBK Government Securities channel — a regulated, retail investor-facing feature requiring cross-functional sign-off across compliance, treasury, and engineering.
• Defined integration success metrics (reconciliation accuracy, SLA adherence, exception rates, operational cost per integration) and established feedback loops that directly shaped roadmap prioritisation across the portfolio.
• Ran Agile ceremonies across multiple squads in a multi-market environment — kept delivery moving through time zone spread and external dependency delays by keeping scope tight and blockers visible early.

Software Engineer & Oracle Applications Developer - E&M Technology House Ltd - Tatu City, Kiambu

(2024-01 - 2025-01)

• Built CRM and Oracle EBS integrations across billing, marketing, and procurement workflows — the technical depth from this role now directly shapes how I scope integration-heavy product requirements and anticipate system edge cases.
• Optimised PL/SQL scripts reducing query execution time by 30% — gained hands-on understanding of what idempotency and auditability actually look like at the data layer.

Data Analyst & Relationship Officer - Equity Bank Limited - Nairobi, Kenya

(2022-07 - 2023-12)

• Ran A/B testing on targeted financial product campaigns, increasing customer engagement by 15% — built structured outcome metrics that fed back into channel and product strategy.
• Launched a referral programme driving 20% growth in customer acquisition, tracked against commercial goals from day one.
• Automated reporting dashboards saving 10+ hours per week — improved data accessibility for product and marketing decision-making across the team.

Freelance Product Developer - Independent - Nairobi, Kenya

(2022-01)

• Built RentMap, a digital housing discovery platform — end-to-end ownership from discovery research through to market launch.
• Deployed M-Pesa-integrated eCommerce platforms on AWS for SME clients — real integration work, not a demo environment.

B.A. - Economics & Statistics - Kenyatta University (2021)

Venture & Entrepreneurship - African Leadership University (2020)