EM Sales Trader at Kappa in London, England, GB

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 flavours of the same; understands the EUR peg mechanics for CFA currencies, the CBN-managed float for NGN, and the regulatory regimes that govern each
• Risk instinct — thinks about exposure at the desk level; understands settlement-window credit risk, counterparty concentration, and the risk surface that comes with own-account trading
• Relational approach to the desk — treats LP and counterparty relationships as essential for the firm’s commercial reach; documents and shares the network rather than hoarding it
• Operational discipline — on the desk when the market opens; owns reconciliation and post-trade hygiene without being asked; escalates with signal, not noise
• Integrity under pressure — can hold honesty and stakeholder management in tension when a position is under duress

Additional experience we would welcome

• An existing, verifiable network in relevant EM corridors that can be activated within the first ninety days
• Experience navigating a major market-specific dislocation — devaluation, sudden capital control, central bank intervention
• Working French or another EM-relevant language at a level that supports relationship-building beyond the transactional
• Published quantitative work, a substantive Masters thesis, or an analytical tool built for and used by a prior desk
• Exposure to EM equities or equity-linked instruments, whether through a trading, sales, or structuring role
• Familiarity with non-deliverable FX — understanding how NDF pricing, fixing conventions, and settlement differ from deliverable spot across the corridors Kappa operates in
• Working knowledge of credit derivatives, including credit default swaps and credit-linked notes, and how they are used to manage counterparty and sovereign credit exposure in EM markets

What the role offers

• A genuinely differentiated trading seat — EM and frontier FX is not a niche on top of a real job; it is the job; the corridors you cover are where the firm’s commercial edge lives
• Equity participation — the role carries an equity allocation; we expect the postholder to take a long-term view of their contribution to the business
• Access to experienced practitioners — a lean desk with direct exposure to senior team members and advisers who have built and run trading operations in the markets that matter for this role
• Purpose-driven work — Kappa operates in a market where improved financial infrastructure has a measurable and material impact on the businesses and communities we serve
• An opportunity to build something that matters.

What we offer

• Highly competitive salary and equity — top of market. We believe in hiring fewer but better people and paying them more.
• Work from our offices in London, Douala, Abidjan or Lagos, or remotely from a timezone compatible with UK and West/Central African hours.