Head of Payments

SUMMARY:
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POSITION INFO:
Key Responsibilities Develop and implement the global payments strategy aligned with the company's growth objectives. Lead and manage the payments function across all brands and markets. Manage and develop the payments team, ensuring high performance and continuous improvement. Research, evaluate, and implement new payment methods, deposit solutions, and emerging payment technologies that enhance operational efficiency, improve customer experience, and support the company's growth objectives. Recruit, mentor and develop a high-performing Payments team, establishing clear objectives, succession planning and a culture of accountability and continuous improvement. Oversee payment processing, reconciliation, settlement, and reporting. Manage payment flows including deposits, withdrawals, and refunds across multiple currencies. Maintain strong operational processes and controls across the payment lifecycle. Responsible for business continuity planning relating specifically to payment failures, PSP outages, banking disruptions and disaster recovery. Monitor and manage payment systems to ensure maximum uptime, reliability, and performance. Ownership of payment incident management and escalation procedures, ensuring rapid communication and resolution during payment outages. Act as the senior escalation point for critical payment incidents, banking outages and high-impact customer payment issues where business continuity is affected. Manage relationships with payment service providers (PSPs), acquiring banks, and alternative payment providers. Negotiate commercial terms, contracts, and service-level agreements with payment partners. Evaluate and onboard new payment providers where required. Responsible for regularly reviewing PSP performance, approval rates, uptime, settlement times and commercial pricing. Ensure compliance with AML, KYC, fraud prevention, card scheme rules, and regulatory requirements across all jurisdictions. Monitor and manage chargebacks, fraud trends, and transaction risks. Work closely with compliance, risk, and finance teams to maintain strong governance over payment operations. Ownership of payment limits, transaction monitoring rules and high-risk customer payment controls. Responsible for managing payment provider audits and supporting regulatory or financial audits relating to payment operations. Monitor payment performance metrics including approval rates, decline rates, processing costs, and chargeback ratios. Identify and implement strategies to optimise payment success rates and reduce transaction costs. Analyse payment data and provide reporting and insights to senior management. Analyse daily and monthly payment and withdrawal trends, identify opportunities for improvement, and develop strategies and processes that optimise performance while aligning with the company's operational and strategic goals. Ownership of customer payment experience, including reducing failed deposits and minimising customer payment complaints. Continuously review the end-to-end payment journey to reduce customer friction, improve conversion rates and deliver a best-in-class deposit and withdrawal experience.