Chief of Staff

Job Classification

Job Family

Leadership Pipeline

Manage Multi-Function

Why Join the Team

This is a unique opportunity to operate at the centre of one of South Africa's leading financial institutions, working alongside the CEO, Chairman and executive leadership team on the decisions that shape the future of Nedbank. The role offers unparalleled exposure across strategy, transformation, digital innovation and enterprise leadership, providing a platform to influence the organisation's most critical priorities while building a broad understanding of the business. It is ideally suited to a leader who enjoys solving complex challenges, navigating ambiguity and driving meaningful impact at scale. Successful candidates will gain rare visibility across Board, Executive Committee and enterprise-level decision-making while helping shape Nedbank's future growth, competitiveness and transformation journey.

Job Purpose

To act as the Chief Executive Officer’s transformation accelerator, trusted counsellor and senior advisor, with dedicated support to the Group Chairman and peer partnership with the Chief Strategist in the Office of the CEO. The role sharpens enterprise focus, strengthens decision quality at CEO and executive level, converts strategy into sequenced execution, leads a highly selective set of group-critical initiatives, and brings pace, structure and challenge to the priorities that matter most to the CEO agenda.

Job Responsibilities

CEO Advisory, Decision Quality and Enterprise Focus

• Shape the CEO and executive agenda to ensure enterprise leadership attention is directed to the highest-value decisions, risks, opportunities and transformation priorities.
• Advise the CEO as a trusted counsellor and constructive challenger, bringing independent judgement, market sensing and enterprise trade-off framing to strengthen decision confidence.
• Drive decision-quality discipline by ensuring issues escalated to the CEO are clear, evidence-led, commercially grounded and positioned for timely executive action.
• Influence executive alignment across clusters and functions to reduce fragmentation, improve accountability and support coherent delivery against group priorities.

Challenger Bank Transformation Mandate

• Drive strategic outcomes that accelerate sharper customer propositions, faster decision cycles, digital-first ways of working and simplified execution across the enterprise.
• Champion customer obsession, digital adoption, platform thinking and data-led decision-making to strengthen market responsiveness, innovation and differentiated positioning.
• Shape enterprise challenge on competitor disruption, fintech partnerships, ecosystem opportunities and product simplification to support sustainable commercial growth.
• Govern the prioritisation of transformation choices to ensure scarce leadership capacity, capital and change-spend are directed to the initiatives with greatest enterprise value.

Enterprise Strategy Integration and Execution Velocity

• Partner the Chief Strategist to convert approved strategy content into prioritised action, sequenced execution and accountable delivery across clusters and functions.
• Pressure-test bottom-up cluster strategies against group ambition, market realities and enterprise constraints to close gaps between strategic intent and delivery capacity.
• Direct executive cadence, value tracking and escalation mechanisms to remove blockers, improve execution confidence and accelerate transformation milestones.
• Provide top-down guidance on trade-offs, capital allocation, change-spend prioritisation and sequencing to support coherent delivery of group targets.

CEO, Chairman and Stakeholder Enablement

• Lead CEO-priority issue resolution across clusters and functions to bring structure, pace and follow-through to ambiguous matters that affect enterprise confidence.
• Represent the CEO in selected forums where delegated enterprise context, strategic judgement and disciplined follow-through are required to maintain alignment.
• Enable high-quality Chairman and Board engagement by strengthening agenda discipline, briefing quality and alignment between executive priorities and governance expectations.
• Partner senior finance and corporate development stakeholders on CEO-priority deals, integration oversight and value capture to support informed executive decisions.

Group-Critical Strategic Initiatives

• Lead a selective portfolio of group-critical transformations on behalf of the CEO to accelerate delivery of strategic outcomes that require cross-enterprise coordination.
• Govern initiative scope, value realisation, dependency management and executive escalation to improve execution confidence and reduce delivery slippage.
• Drive senior stakeholder commitment across business, digital, product, finance and enabling functions to ensure transformation outcomes are commercially relevant and executable.
• Account for clear CEO-level visibility of progress, risks and trade-offs so that leadership interventions are timely, focused and aligned to enterprise priorities

Job Responsibilities Continue

Essential Qualifications

Relevant undergraduate degree in Commerce, Business, Finance, Economics, Strategy, or a related field.

Preferred Qualification

Postgraduate qualification such as MBA, MCom, MSc, or equivalent; CA(SA) or CFA would be advantageous where aligned to the role domain.

Minimum Experience Level

Minimum of 10–12 years’ experience in senior leadership, enterprise strategy, corporate development, transformation, financial services, or top-tier strategy consulting, including exposure to complex cross-functional decision-making at executive level.

Preferred: Approximately 15+ years’ experience, including demonstrated delivery of group-critical transformation, strategic execution, M&A, partnership, digital, product, or customer-led change in a large matrixed financial services environment.

Technical / Professional Knowledge

Behavioural Competencies

• Strategic Influence
• Executive Presence
• Driving Execution
• Devise Strategy
• Digital Acumen
• Financial Acumen
• Thriving in Ambiguity