Head of Customer Success: Payments & Embedded Accounts
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Summary
Founding Customer Success leader for ZBD's payments business, owning the customer journey from signed contract through KYB onboarding, technical integration, go-live, retention and expansion for embedded payouts and embedded accounts used by game platforms. Year one is hands-on (playbooks, tooling, reporting, managing strategic customers), later hiring CSMs; requires deep payments/fintech, complia
The role
ZBD is fintech built for the games industry: a regulated money layer that lets games platforms move real money in, around and out of their platforms without becoming payments companies. ZBD has raised ~$90M from Kingsway Capital, The Raine Group, Aream & Co, Square Enix, Lakestar and Blockstream Capital Partners.
We are building our Customer Success function for a new business stream: Embedded payouts and Embedded Accounts.
You will be the founding Customer Success leader for ZBD's payments business, owning the customer journey from signed contract through integration, first transaction, ongoing account health and expansion. You will build the operating model yourself before building the team around it. FYI - we have a customer success playbook, but it was written for mobile rewards.
This is not a traditional SaaS Customer Success role. Our customers are moving real money, so success depends on getting the operational, technical, compliance and commercial pieces working together. You will define how a customer goes from contract to live payouts, how we support them once money is moving, and how we grow them into additional rails, geographies, titles and Embedded Accounts.
In year one, you will do much of this yourself. As the customer base grows, you will hire and lead the team that delivers it.
You will be a player-coach and the owner of the function: building the playbooks, tooling, reporting and operating model while personally managing the first strategic customers.
This is a role for someone who wants to build a function from first principles - and who is comfortable being the person customers call when money needs to move and something has gone wrong.
Build and deliver
- Support the sale: Join BD calls to speak to how we onboard, operate and support; help prospects and their finance and compliance teams get comfortable moving money with ZBD.
- Own the customer lifecycle: Define and operate the journey from BD handoff, KYB and compliance onboarding, funds-flow setup, technical integration, go-live, steady state. Set the SLA for signed-to-live and own performance against it.
- Run customer onboarding: manage the process, inc working directly with their product, engineering and finance teams. Taking personal responsibility for the early deals. Build the tooling and reporting: onboarding checklists, health dashboards, a weekly CS report to the commercial leadership.
- Own retention: build the account health model: payout success and return rates, settlement timing, GMV trends, cost-to-serve, ticket patterns and act on it before customers do.
- Be the customer's voice in every incident: failed or delayed payouts, compliance holds, fraud events. Coordinate engineering, payment operations and compliance, and keep the customer informed with precision.
- Understand and monitor the economics of each account, including GMV, revenue, take rate, payment/rail costs, FX, support costs and contribution margin.
- Own the commercial plan for the existing customer base: identify opportunities for increased payment volume, additional products, geographies, rails and embedded accounts; quantify the opportunity; and work with BD to convert it. Maintain a rolling expansion forecast across the customer base and provide monthly visibility to the CCO.
- Provide structured feedback for product requirements to Product and Engineering: what the platforms need on ledgers, tax reporting, payee experience, age-gating.
Scale
- Hire and lead Customer Success Managers as the order book converts.
- Segment the book (TBC), set coverage models, and run the function against retention, GMV and expansion targets.
Customer first. You measure yourself by whether the customer's money moved correctly and whether they would recommend us. You are the person who picks up the phone when something breaks, not the one who waits for the ticket.
Proactive. You spot the pattern in the data before it becomes churn. You over-communicate internally and externally. Nobody has to ask you for a status update.
Technically competent. You can read API documentation, sit in an integration call with a customer's engineers and hold your own, understand how a widget or web view is embedded, and translate a compliance constraint into a product change a PM can act on.
What we are looking for:
- 7–10+ years in payments, fintech, embedded finance or another regulated financial infrastructure business, with significant experience in customer success, implementation, account management or post-sales leadership.
- You have worked in a regulated or highly controlled financial infrastructure environment and understand how KYB, transaction monitoring, funds segregation, sanctions/fraud controls and payment returns affect the customer experience and operating model.
- You have onboarded customers whose end users receive money (many-to-many flows), not just merchants who accept it.
- You have built or materially rebuilt or implemented a CS function - processes, tooling, reporting, team - and can show what changed.
- You are commercially fluent: you understand GMV-based pricing, take rates and cost-plus on rails, and can defend a fee structure to a customer's finance team.
- You have managed enterprise-grade incidents with customers and kept the relationship intact.
Additionally we are interested in:
- Experience with marketplaces, UGC or creator platforms, or gaming.
- Familiarity with tax reporting for payees (1099, DAC7) and cross-border payouts.
- Experience hiring and managing high-performing teams.
- Signed-to-live: customers consistently launched within agreed SLA.
- Retention: strong GRR, low preventable churn and clear ownership of customer risks.
- Customer health: 100% of live accounts have an up-to-date health assessment, success plan and identified risks.
- Commercial growth: increasing GMV and a qualified expansion pipeline across existing accounts.
- Product adoption: successful migration of appropriate payouts customers into Embedded Accounts.
- Operational excellence: incidents handled quickly, transparently and with clear follow-through.
- Function building: playbooks, tooling, reporting and team structure established as the customer base scales.