Governance Manager

About Tamara

Tamara stands as Saudi Arabia's foremost fintech platform, facilitating shopping, payments, and banking across the GCC region. Recognized as the first fintech unicorn in Saudi Arabia, Tamara aims to empower daily financial activities while revolutionizing commerce and banking. Serving millions across KSA, UAE, and Kuwait, Tamara collaborates with prominent brands such as SHEIN, Jarir, noon, IKEA, eXtra, Farfetch, and numerous SMEs. The firm is backed by prominent investors including Sanabil Investments, SNB Capital, and Checkout.com.

Role Overview

The Governance Manager will be an essential part of Tamara's Governance team, responsible for ensuring that the organization's actions, decisions, and documentation comply with all regulatory and internal governance requirements. This involves close collaboration with Legal, Compliance, Risk, and various business units to manage governance forums, approvals, and maintain comprehensive records such as charters, policies, meeting minutes, decision logs, and action trackers. The role supports efficient oversight and fosters transparent, consistent, and well-regulated operations.

Key Responsibilities

• Developing, maintaining, and improving the governance framework to establish clear accountability and oversight mechanisms including committees, charters, RACI matrices, escalation paths, and decision tracking.
• Ensuring governance processes align with regulatory compliance, risk management, and control effectiveness organization-wide.
• Coordinating the preparation and review of governance-related materials for senior management and Board committees, ensuring they are thorough and decision-ready.
• Leading the full cycle of policy governance, including creation, ownership assignment, periodic review, approval processes, version control, publication, and retirement of policies.
• Maintaining a centralized policy inventory detailing ownership, procedures, scope, jurisdiction (KSA/Group), approval authorities, effective dates, review schedules, and audit trails.
• Mapping policies to regulatory requirements (notably SAMA) and retiring outdated policies appropriately.
• Managing a structured register of regulatory obligations and compliance mappings, linking SAMA mandates to internal controls, SOPs, and evidentiary artifacts along with ownership and testing rhythms.
• Preparing comprehensive evidence packages for regulatory inspections or requests, including approvals, logs, attestations, training completions, control results, and remediation documentation.
• Coordinating internal efforts and reviews responding to SAMA inquiries, ensuring accurate, consistent, and governance-approved responses supported by solid evidence.
• Monitoring and tracking SAMA commitments and deadlines to guarantee timely submissions and updates, driving follow-ups to prevent delays.
• Enforcing strict controls over external sharing of policies and confidential governance materials, ensuring circulation only of approved and current versions after proper review.
• Managing governance processes for SAMA observations by logging issues, assigning responsibility, tracking milestones, escalating overdue actions, and overseeing remediation actions with thorough root-cause and corrective measures documentation.
• Serving as the secretariat or coordinating secretariat functions for relevant committees, including scheduling, agenda preparation, minute taking, action tracking, and documentation of decisions or exceptions.
• Ensuring committee outcomes are documented clearly and enacted through necessary changes such as policy updates, control modifications, training initiatives, or communications.
• Implementing governance checkpoints for significant organizational changes, particularly those impacting regulators, covering policy and control modifications, risk exceptions, and customer-facing processes.
• Overseeing assurance activities by coordinating responses to audits and compliance reviews, providing complete documentation, evidence, management action plans, and tracking issue closures.
• Fostering awareness and accountability culture by managing policy communication standards, owner training, periodic attestations, and promoting consistent governance practices organization-wide.
• Delivering governance performance reports and management information (MI) to senior stakeholders, addressing policy compliance, overdue reviews, regulatory items, remediation status, and upcoming SAMA deadlines.

Qualifications and Experience

• Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration, Law, or a closely related discipline.
• 5 to 8 years of hands-on experience in corporate governance roles.
• In-depth experience in banking or financial institutions within the Saudi market with solid familiarity with SAMA and CMA regulations, policies, and requirements.
• Strong grasp of corporate governance fundamentals including Board and committee structures, decision rights, and delegation of authority.
• Comprehensive understanding of board and committee operations such as agenda planning, calendar management, minute documentation, and action follow-ups.
• Awareness of regulatory compliance standards and governance expectations within the financial services sector.
• Expertise in policy lifecycle management and document control encompassing drafting, review, approval, publication, review cycles, and versioning.
• Risk management, audit preparedness, and control assessment skills focused on traceability, record auditability, and governance artifacts.
• Excellent executive communication and writing capabilities for clear documentation, including minutes, memos, policies, and presentations, particularly for Boards.
• Proven stakeholder management skills, including coordination between Legal, Compliance, Risk, and Finance teams along with managing interactions with senior stakeholders.
• Strong organizational abilities with disciplined planning, meeting deadlines, managing multiple governance projects, and following up effectively.
• Detail-oriented with a commitment to confidentiality and sound judgment handling sensitive information.
• Proficiency with tools such as Notion, SharePoint, document repositories, tracking systems, and the Microsoft Office suite.