Reconciliation Officer

Overview

The National Bank of Commerce (NBC), Tanzania's oldest bank with more than fifty years of industry expertise, offers a wide array of banking services including retail, corporate, investment banking, and wealth management.

Primary Duties

This position is responsible for conducting timely, precise, and thorough reconciliations across assigned suspense, digital, Nostro, settlement, and general ledger accounts. The role includes identifying, investigating, escalating, and correcting reconciling discrepancies. The incumbent maintains detailed documentation and delivers dependable reconciliation data to management to aid financial controls, regulatory adherence, fraud prevention, and informed decision-making.

Key responsibilities encompass:

• Conducting daily reconciliations ensuring completeness and expeditious detection of unmatched or aged transactions.
• Investigating anomalies by reviewing source documents, system entries, transaction reports, and submissions to recommend corrective measures.
• Collaborating with branches, operations, finance, technology, and other units to obtain clarifications and necessary evidence for clearing outstanding items.
• Assessing the validity, ownership, ageing, and risk associated with reconciling items and escalating significant or high-risk exceptions.
• Updating and managing reconciliation templates, evidence, and exception logs in designated shared repositories for audit and management review.
• Guiding process owners and branch teams on reconciliation protocols, balancing methods, and resolution of outstanding items.
• Carrying out additional reconciliation, control, or reporting duties as assigned by supervisors or managers.

Compliance and Risk Management

• Keeping current with NBC’s policies, reconciliation standards, operational risk protocols, and control requirements.
• Adhering to user access policies, information security, confidentiality, and segregation of duties consistently.
• Maintaining complete, accurate, and accessible records of reconciliations, approvals, and evidence per retention policies.
• Contributing to loss prevention by detecting control flaws, operational risks, unusual trends, and potential fraud via reconciliation activities.
• Complying with KYC, AML, sanctions, regulatory, and internal controls applicable to reconciliation processes.
• Facilitating internal and external audit processes through timely provision of evidence and updates.
• Generating or assisting with management reports detailing reconciliation status, outstanding issues, root causes, and resolutions.
• Ensuring all reconciliation activities are within approved mandates and escalation guidelines.

Professional Development

• Achieving agreed performance and development goals set within personal development plans.
• Setting measurable objectives with supervisors and regularly reviewing progress.
• Proactively identifying skill gaps, training needs, and growth opportunities relating to reconciliation, risk management, and reporting.
• Incorporating feedback, learning from experiences, and striving for continuous enhancement in quality, timeliness, and stakeholder service.

Qualifications and Experience

• Bachelor’s degree or advanced diploma in Banking, Accounting, Finance, Business Administration, or a related discipline.
• Minimum one year of relevant experience in reconciliation, operations within banking or finance, branch operations, or related controls.
• Sound knowledge of suspense, digital, settlement, Nostro, and general ledger account operations including reconciliation and exception handling.

Skill Requirements

• Excellent analytical, numerical, and problem-solving abilities to interpret transaction data and determine discrepancy causes.
• Exceptional attention to detail and accuracy in preparing reconciliations and associated documentation.
• Understanding of accounting principles, banking reconciliation concepts, internal controls, and operational risk frameworks.
• Familiarity with relevant regulations including KYC, AML, sanctions, and compliance affecting bank operations.
• Effective planning and prioritization skills to manage multiple reconciliations within strict deadlines.
• Capability to work independently and collaboratively with various departments.
• Proficiency in Microsoft Office, particularly Word, PowerPoint, and intermediate to advanced Excel skills such as pivot tables, filtering, lookups, and basic data analysis.
• Clear and professional written and verbal communication skills for discussing exceptions, risks, and required actions.

Additional Information

• Core competencies include analytical thinking, ethics and values, quality orientation, with some development required in digital familiarity, team enablement, management accounting, and openness to change.