EM Sales Trader

### About Kappa African businesses import $700 billion worth of goods and services per year but paying their suppliers abroad remains a massive challenge. Their options today are limited to traditional banks and the black market. Going through banks means poor customer service, high transaction costs and unfavorable exchange rates. Transactions that should take a few days end up taking weeks and cost merchants up to 9% in fees. The situation is equally dire for consumers who pay some of the highest P2P transfer fees in the world and are stuck with mobile money technology that is now decades old. We are building Kappa to fix that. Our cross-border payments platform is designed for ultra low-cost, near-instant money transfer at significantly higher transaction sizes than what’s currently possible. Our mission is to break down the barriers that have held back African businesses for decades. ### About the opportunity Kappa is building a multi-asset trading desk to sit at the heart of its cross-border payments infrastructure. This is not a conventional sales trading seat. The markets you will work are opaque, relationship-dependent, and structurally different from the G10 world — wide spreads, capital controls, information that travels through human interaction rather than market data feeds. Liquidity does not present itself on a screen; you will source it. The role spans FX spot, forwards, and swaps across African and EM corridors, with the mandate growing into fixed income and money-market instruments as the desk expands its product offering. The sweet spot is two to five years into a markets career, with demonstrable EM or frontier exposure and the quantitative foundation to do your own analytics. ### What you'll do - **FX execution across EM corridors** — sourcing and executing spot, forward, and swap transactions across African and other EM currency pairs, including XAF, XOF, NGN, and adjacent corridors; maintaining a live read on where fair value sits across the LP set - **LP relationship management** — holding live conversations across the liquidity provider set from 7am UK time; maintaining the relationships through which prices and flow can be sourced under pressure; treating the network as Kappa’s institutional asset - **Market intelligence and desk analytics** — turning corridor data, customer flow, and LP behaviour into actionable desk intelligence; building and maintaining analytical tools to track spreads, regime changes, and counterparty positioning - **Regulatory and capital control navigation** — understanding what capital controls, central bank interventions, and jurisdiction-specific settlement requirements mean in practice; staying ahead of regulatory signals in the corridors you cover - **Risk and counterparty management** — thinking about exposure at the desk level, not just the trade level; assessing counterparties on financial health, regulatory standing, and behaviour under stress; surfacing concerns before they become problems - **Post trade** — owning reconciliation, and post-trade hygiene, not as a back-office task; escalating unusual signal early with calibrated judgement ### What you'll bring - **Demonstrable EM or frontier FX experience —** two to five years working African or other EM corridors in a markets role; the market quirks, capital controls, and counterparty dynamics must be the substance of prior work - **Multi-asset fluency —** working knowledge of FX spot, forwards, swaps, and options; working knowledge of bond pricing and money-market instruments in EM markets; able to reason from first principles about instruments you haven’t personally traded - **Quantitative capability —** comfortable with statistics and time-series analysis applied to live trading work; able to munge data in Python, R, or VBA to build a chart, run a back-test, or calculate a metric without it being a project - **Corridor-level market knowledge —** treats XAF, XOF, NGN, and other EM currencies as distinct markets, not…