Lusaka, Zambia · Payments & onboarding systems

I get payment systems live — and keep them explainable.

Manager, Technical Operations at iZyane InovSolutions & Payments and Vice President at Lotus Technologies. I scope POS and KYC platforms for banks, test them until they hold, and write the specs, runbooks and guides the people on the other side actually use.

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Sectors Banking · Fintech · Public sector Working with Banks across Zambia & the region

PROFILE AUTHORISATIONiZyane InovSolutions & Payments · ZM

NAME
Zawadi Kayoka
ROLE
Manager, Technical Ops
iZyane InovSolutions
ALSO
Vice President
Lotus Technologies
DOMAIN
Payments · KYC · Merchant services
STANDARDS
EMV L3 · Visa F360
OUTPUTS
Specs, runbooks,
test suites, proposals
AVAILABILITYOPEN

APPROVED

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What I do

Four things banks keep asking me for

Most of my work sits in the gap between a signed proposal and a system that people can actually run without calling the vendor every morning.

Payments & terminals

POS and merchant operations

Terminal deployment and management, merchant onboarding, field operations, settlement and reconciliation, and the unglamorous diagnostic work when a card declines and nobody knows why.

Compliance systems

KYC and account opening

Requirements for customer onboarding platforms: user roles and permissions, CDD risk-rating logic, remediation flows, and retail account opening journeys that survive a compliance review.

Quality

Test design and documentation

End-to-end test scripts written module by module, user guides with real screenshots, environment runbooks, change requests and functional design specs — produced through an automated build pipeline, not hand-formatted.

Commercial

Proposals and delivery

Bid and proposal writing with costed scope, SLA commitments and sprint plans, then staying on as the person who tracks the tasks and keeps the client informed until handover.

Selected work

Recent engagements

A sample of delivery work for banks and platform clients. Details are kept at the level that can be discussed publicly.

KYC platform Commercial bank, Zambia
Documentation & QA lead

Account opening and KYC system

Owned the documentation and test estate for a bank-wide KYC and account opening platform: a 50-page illustrated user guide, a user-roles and creation-requirements matrix, an environment setup runbook covering both on-premise GPU and cloud AI deployment, and a delivery tracker across the backend, frontend and mobile team.

119 test cases · 16 modulesUser guideEnvironment runbookRoles matrix
Merchant services Commercial bank, Zambia
Proposal & solution design

POS field operations proposal

Authored a five-pillar proposal for outsourced POS field operations and merchant services — merchant location capture, KYC remediation, retail account onboarding and remote terminal monitoring — with SLA commitments and a sprint-based delivery plan. Supported it with a client demo deck and the scope for a field-agent mobile app handling verification and terminal dispatch.

SLA design8-sprint planDemo deckMobile app scope
POS application Commercial bank, Zambia
Change requests & diagnostics

Terminal app changes and root-cause analysis

Produced the change request and functional design spec for a POS application — failed-transaction re-check and admin-controlled service visibility. Separately traced two live production faults to their real causes: card payments failing because backend location validation rejected the operator login before EMV was ever invoked, and a revenue file gap caused by batch settlement never being run.

Functional design specEMV troubleshootingSettlement & reconciliation
Certification Commercial bank, Zambia
Procurement documentation

Visa L3 certification readiness

Prepared the RFQ for Visa L3 certification of a terminal fleet, including the prerequisite that the bank's test tooling be brought current before formal testing could begin — flagged early enough to protect the timeline.

RFQVisa F360Vendor coordination
Internal tooling iZyane
Built and maintained

A document pipeline instead of a template folder

Client documents are generated, not typed: a Node.js build produces the Word file, a Python step patches the markup for schema compliance and heading structure, LibreOffice renders the PDF headless, and the output is validated page by page before it goes out. Branding, numbering and figure references stay consistent across every deliverable.

Node.jsPython · OOXMLLibreOffice headlessAutomated QA
Platform QA Travel booking client
Test authoring

Manual test suite for a bus booking platform

Wrote a 77-case manual test suite covering search, seat selection, payment and ticketing paths, structured so a non-technical tester could run it end to end and report against it.

77 test casesPayment flowsUAT support

How the work runs

Proposal to handover, in order

This is a sequence, and the order matters — most projects that go sideways skipped step four or five.

01

Scope

Understand the operation, not just the request. Cost it honestly and write down what is out of scope.

02

Specify

Functional design and change requests, agreed in writing before anyone builds against a guess.

03

Build

Coordinate backend, frontend and mobile work against a tracked plan with named owners and dates.

04

Test

Case-by-case scripts per module, run properly, with failures logged and closed rather than noted.

05

Document

User guides, runbooks and role matrices — so the system can be operated without me in the room.

06

Hand over

Train the users, agree support terms, and stay reachable while the first live cycles settle.

Toolkit

What I work with

Payments

  • POS terminal deployment & management
  • EMV troubleshooting, Visa L3 / F360 certification
  • Merchant onboarding & field operations
  • Settlement, batch upload & reconciliation

Onboarding & compliance

  • KYC and account opening workflows
  • CDD risk-rating logic and thresholds
  • Role-based access & approval design
  • Remediation and retail onboarding journeys

Delivery & documentation

  • Proposals, RFQs, SLAs, sprint planning
  • Functional design specs & change requests
  • Test case design and UAT coordination
  • Automated document builds (Node.js, Python, OOXML)

Technical & analytical

  • Linux administration, Proxmox virtualisation
  • Networking, remote access, self-hosted infrastructure
  • Excel modelling, SPSS, applied statistics
  • Log analysis and web application hardening

Contact

Have a system that needs shipping?

Tell me what the operation looks like today and where it breaks. I reply to everything.

zawadikayoka4@gmail.com
LinkedIn +260 97 193 8765 Lusaka, Zambia · CAT (UTC+2)