Card Schemes & Acquiring Partnerships Senior Manager

About the job:

Our growing regional payments company is looking for an experienced payments professional to help establish its merchant-acquiring and payment-gateway capabilities.

This is a full-time position based in Singapore, reporting to a senior legal and compliance leader.

The person will build the required banking and payment-partner ecosystem and coordinate the business from initial setup through to launch and ongoing operations.

Responsibilities

• Build relationships with card schemes, acquiring banks, settlement banks, payment processors, gateways and other payment providers.
• Assess different merchant-acquiring models and recommend the most suitable approach for the business.
• Evaluate potential partners based on their capabilities, commercial terms and implementation requirements.
• Negotiate processing fees, settlement timelines, reserves, service levels and other commercial arrangements.
• Coordinate partner applications, due diligence, registrations, approvals and renewals.
• Manage technical integration, testing and certification activities with product and engineering teams.
• Translate partner requirements into clear business, operational and technical actions.
• Build operating processes covering merchant onboarding, settlement, reconciliation, refunds, chargebacks and fraud.
• Track partner obligations, certifications, service performance, incidents and outstanding dependencies.
• Coordinate launch-readiness reviews across product, engineering, finance, treasury, risk, compliance, information security and operations.
• Monitor payment performance and resolve settlement failures, service issues or partner breaches.
• Support the transition from implementation into stable day-to-day payment operations.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Business, Finance, Economics, Technology, Law or a related discipline.
• Around 8+ years of relevant payments experience.
• Practical experience working with a card scheme, acquiring bank, payment facilitator, merchant acquirer, gateway or payment processor.
• Direct involvement in building or launching a new payments, acquiring or card-processing capability.
• Good understanding of card authorization, clearing, settlement, processing fees, refunds, chargebacks and fraud.
• Experience coordinating commercial, technical, operational and legal workstreams.
• Working knowledge of payment-security standards and partner due-diligence requirements.=
• Strong project-management, negotiation, analytical and stakeholder-management skills.
• Ability to turn complex partner requirements into clear actions for internal teams.
• Comfortable building new processes in an environment where requirements are still developing.