Need Help to review Stage 1 documentation - Exceptional Promise in FinTech

Stage 1
1

Dear All,

I’m in the process of gathering documents for endorsement specialising in Payments Innovation, Product Delivery, and Digital Infrastructure. I have a technical + commercial/project leadership + digital product manager experience in digital payments in more than one country. So far I have updated my CV and personal statement and would like to have someone review and confirm if I’m on the right track.

My approach for the whole idea is summarised below.

Mandatory Criterion (MC)
Theme: Early leadership in digital payments and product delivery
MC1 — Multi-country digital payments delivery (Contains screenshots, project summaries, my role in deployments.)
MC2 — Recommendation Letter 1 (Senior Technical Specialist)
MC3 — Process redesign (As-Is/To-Be) contribution

Optional Criterion 1 — Innovation (OC1)
Theme: Contribution to digital payment product enhancements
OC1.1 — API Journey Mapping and Requirements Documentation - API-Payment-Journey-Mapping.pdf
OC1.2 — UAT ownership with test cases authored by you - UAT-Test-Cases.pdf
OC1.3 — Dashboard and Data Model Design - PowerBI-DataModel-Dashboard.pdf

Optional Criterion 3 — Commercial Impact (OC3)
Theme: Impact on revenue, adoption, efficiency
OC3.1 — digital payments growth evidence
OC3.2 — $1M revenue uplift evidence
OC3.3 — Vendor Performance Improvement Evidence
OC3.4 — Process automation and efficiency gains

Recommendation letters

Letter 1 — Senior Manager Digital Services
Purpose: Mandatory Criterion + OC3 validation

Letter 2 — Lead Payments Integrations
Supports Mandatory Criterion + OC1

Letter 3 — Customer Experience Manager
Supports Mandatory Criterion + OC3

please review the approach and guide me where I’m still short of, Thank you

2

Hi @M.Jingo

Your application outline above only mentions titles of documents under each criteria without sharing details of what each evidence compromises - without this info it’s hard to share a fair evaluation.

However few pointers:

  1. Do you work for a product-led company? From what you have mentioned about your role, it’s a mix of roles that are and are not eligible.
  2. MC is about showing industry recognition for your work. It looks like all your evidences are from within the company largely showcasing your contributions as self-claims. However what is required to succeed in MC is not just contribution but impact of your contribution that got industry recognition. In my experience, a purely internal evidence set in MC without any external recognition evidence and a strong validation of impact of your contribution - is weak.
  3. OC1 is about demonstrating innovation, your contribution, its market traction and validation. However your OC1 evidence set looks like self-claims of your own contribution. It’s unclear how test cases and dashboards are innovation and what has been the impact and market traction of your contribution to these innovations. Purely self-claimed contributions are insufficient to clear OC1, you need strong third party validation example proof of product in market, proof of innovation, customer reviews, market traction covered in PR/News/Media/any validating reference letter.
  4. OC3 is about demonstrating quantified impact on core company metrics. While the titles of your evidences display some impact, purely self-claims will lead to rejection. You need reference letter from senior executives to confirm not just your contribution but also attribute the quantified impact to you specifically.

Essentially you need to a. Align with the criteria asks better b. Provide more solid proofs of your self-claims across evidences

3

Hi @pahuja

Thanks so much for taking the time to share this depth and apologies for not sharing sufficiently.

Here below is my response to your questions in the same order.

  1. Until late last year I was working with a product-led company in various roles. Whereas the roles were majorly business oriented (in title and nature), my effort/results stretched them towards fintech as by handling digital payments integrations with multiple financial institutions, managing these products on all fronts (business, technical and regulatory). From this background, I was aiming at working with the business and technical contributions to present the case.

  2. Breaking down my MC evidence, I was thinking of the below. Please assist with more evaluation of my case.

**Innovation 1 ** - I pioneered a validation approach that supported business continuity (during downtime) which kept revenue streams and targets in line and the approach was later adopted by other markets within the business. The challenge I’m facing is getting the business case I submitted, if it carries some extra weight here but my former superiors could attest to this in the supporting documents, I’m just not sure of acquiring server-level reporting to validate and compare the impact of downtime for vendors where the idea hadn’t been implemented at the time.

Innovation 2 - I initiated, led UI/UX research and later the implementation of self service via USSD. I do have a copy of the BRS that I submitted for this initiative as evidence. The benefit was both technical and commercial. I could get stats for this.

  1. OC1, I was lining up the following.
  • screenshots of business and commercial impact (product adoption/usage as well as revenue) and the traction. I’m also trying to see if I can get historical reports to justify further. The test cases are part of my end to end management of the products (ussd, mobile app and web channels), wrapping my effort around the innovations I contributed. I can present proof of the products in market (app/play store and urls), it might also be possible to get Media/PR related content about the solutions. A reference letter is guaranteed
  1. OC3, I have planned a submission of company metrics as screenshots from dashboards and reports and perhaps acknowledgement from a former line manager that the reports and data presented is indeed true and accurate and also from analytics approach, dashboards which I created - that were not there in the first place. (I’m thinking this is a small “innovation”)

Based on the above brief, what’s your take on the application? I thank you once again.

4

@M.Jingo

So, you need to decide which skill set area you want to apply with, technical or business. If its technical you don’t need to be working in a product led company or necessarily tech sector, but then, your role must be technical. for business role, you should be working in the Tech sector.

Also, note that trying to be everywhere as an expert will do more harm than good to your application, just choose one skill set, that your narrative and evidence set reflects and falls back on.

Your MC1(Contains screenshots, project summaries, my role in deployments.) is weak, but with a reference letter from an expert can be okay, MC2, for a reference letter to be strong, it should be referencing an evidence. MC3 is a weak evidence for MC. In all honesty, OC1 - OC3 is not showing that you innovated or did anything innovative - Journey Mapping is not an innovation and others won’t demonstrate that you have a proven track record of innovation in the sector

OC3 - digital payments growth evidence and $1M revenue uplift evidence. What evidence do you have to show for these? Vendor Performance Improvement Evidence and Process automation and efficiency gains are description of perhaps what you did and don’t appear to be evidence.

Your LOR authors are okay, except Customer Experience Manger, for others check their LinkedIn profile and be sure they have a convincing career trajectory in the sector.

Remember, I started with you choosing a skill set area, your evidence set is a mix of Technical and Business, as a technical applicants, you must demonstrate proven technical expertise with the latest technologies in building, using, deploying or exploiting a technology stack and building technical infrastructure and as a business applicant you should demonstrate a proven commercial, investment, or product expertise in building digital products or leading investments in significant digital product businesses.

I suggest you decide first on the skill set area, then gather your evidence and tell your career story around it.

All the best