Head of Payments

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.