Sustaining a nearly three-decade career in the highly regulated and competitive field of financial controls requires exceptional discipline, technical precision, and enduring strategic focus.
From audit oversight and capital adequacy frameworks to risk management and regulatory compliance, maintaining both rigor and ambition over such a period is a defining hallmark of leadership. Daniel Jere, Chief Financial Officer of National Bank of Malawi, exemplifies this standard.
This discipline is reflected in the clarity and progression of his career trajectory, which began at KPMG and has advanced through a series of deliberate and strategically aligned roles. Today, he serves as a key member of the executive leadership team at Malawi’s largest bank by assets and profitability, where he continues to drive financial stewardship, governance excellence, and sustainable growth.
Forged in Assurance
Jere’s professional formation began at KPMG in Blantyre, where he rose from trainee accountant to audit semi-senior across two years of foundational client work. He deepened that grounding at Deloitte, Malawi’s leading assurance and advisory firm, progressing from audit senior to financial management consultant, working across business process re-engineering assignments and strategic advisory projects for clients in multiple sectors of the Malawian economy.
At Correia Construction and later Times Group, Jere moved into operational finance leadership, clearing multi-year reporting backlogs, resolving entrenched tax disputes, renegotiating debt obligations, and managing treasury functions under pressure. At Times Group, he brought management accounts to current status within eight months. At Correia Construction, his treasury restructuring enabled the company to survive a genuinely difficult period.
The Audit Years and the Making of a Banker
When Jere joined NICO Holdings as Group Head of Internal Audit and later Group Head of Risk and Compliance Services, he was building infrastructure from scratch, establishing a centralized internal audit function for a newly restructured, multi-country financial services group with operations spanning Malawi, Zambia, Tanzania, Uganda, and Mozambique.
At Standard Bank Malawi, he developed audit procedures for HR that were adopted group-wide across all African operations, a contribution that transcended the local and became continental standard. He also certified the adequacy of the Bank’s ICAAP and capital management directly to the Reserve Bank of Malawi — carrying personal regulatory accountability of the highest order.
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CFO and the Wider Mandate
Jere’s appointment as Chief Financial Officer of the National Bank of Malawi is the natural culmination of a career spent learning how financial institutions work from the inside out. In the CFO seat, he sets the group finance strategy, provides financial leadership to the CEO and Executive Committee, oversees capital and liquidity management, ensures IFRS compliance, and monitors the performance of NBM’s subsidiaries and associates against group financial objectives. He manages the Bank’s relationships with the Reserve Bank of Malawi, tax authorities, external and internal auditors, and the wider group structure — a stakeholder portfolio that demands both technical command and diplomatic precision.
Beyond the Bank, Jere sits on the boards of NBM Development Bank Limited, NBM Pensions Administration Limited, NBM Capital Markets, and Akiba Commercial Bank Plc, bringing the full weight of his governance experience to bear across the Group’s subsidiaries. He also serves simultaneously as President of ICAM, the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Malawi, and as a Board Member of ICAM Investments Limited, a reflection of the professional community’s recognition that in Daniel Jere, Malawian finance has one of its most credible and consequential practitioners.
TheCFO Magazine’s CFO of the Week recognizes exceptional Chief Financial Officers across the globe, celebrating their outstanding leadership, impactful achievements, innovative solutions, extensive industry expertise, and invaluable contributions to their organizations.
