Payments - Product Owner

Product Owner - Payments

Domain: Payments

Location: London / Hybrid (in office 3 days a week)

Term: Permanent / Full-time

Reports to: CPO (Chief Product Officer)

About us

My client is part of the Payments Infrastructure 1,000+ person ecosystem who offer their customers (Market Leading PSP’s, ISV’s, Acquirers, PayFac’s ) global payments, accounts, liquidity, and FX for financial institutions and regulated businesses, B”B BNPL & Lending solutions.

My client within this ecosystem, are a fast-growing BaaS (Banking-as-a-Service) and embedded payment services provider offering card issuing and BIN sponsorship, and accounts, payments and FX to businesses, with the tools, APIs and infrastructure to allow clients and partners to build cutting-edge financial services. The leadership team has extensive payments experience, who are committed to driving continued growth and scale as we expand internationally, with a presence in the UK, Europe and US, & recently hired their first CPO to whom this role will report.

My client operates as an independent affiliate of wider payments infrastructure provider, and while they are separate companies, they work closely together to deliver a market-competitive, and continually evolving product offering that augments established EMI licensed cards capabilities with world-class payments, accounts and FX capabilities provided by their sister business.. They are a global and diverse team, with headquarters in London & Newcastle) & offices in Lithuania and USA too.

About the role:

As the Product Owner for Payments, you will be responsible for delivering best-in-class payments functionality and the platform that powers outsized business value for payments use cases for our clients and partners, with a view to scaling our capabilities and ensuring we remain competitive and innovate in a rapidly evolving landscape. You will work alongside our Product team that delivers our Cards, Compliance, Onboarding and US specific capabilities.

Leveraging your deep understanding of the business and our engineering capabilities, you will own the product roadmap for our account-to-account cross-border, FX, local payments, and accounts solutions. You will be responsible for the definition of product requirements and features, management and prioritisation of the backlog, and contributing to the broader overall product vision and strategy. This is a critical role for a key product proposition, with exposure to senior management and real responsibility.

You must have experience with developing B2B solutions and be accustomed to successfully managing projects of varying size and complexity from inception through to completion. You will be engaging with internal stakeholders across the organisation, clients and partners, and third parties to deliver critical projects and business outcomes for our clients.

We are looking for someone who is a proactive self-starter, can operate independently with degrees of ambiguity, and is ready to roll up their sleeves and get things done. Curiosity, a drive to learn, and problem solving ability will be critical in the role. Being able to move up and down levels of abstraction from high level client needs to detailed engineering requirements will be important. An eagerness to talk to clients and balance client and business needs to drive globally scalable solutions is key in this role.

In the role you will:

• Build a strong understanding of how our clients send and receive payments across the world, with a global view on how to scale our payments platform across international markets and different use cases
• Develop empathy for client needs, use cases and jobs to be done, with regular client engagement for feedback, collaboration and validation
• Take end-to-end ownership over the delivery of new payments features and improvements to existing features
• Take responsibility and ownership for change initiatives, driving projects forward with a focus on strategic goals
• Translate product client and business needs into well-defined product requirements and feature definitions including epics, user stories, and acceptance test criteria
• Provide clear communication outlining the impacts of changes in users of the systems you are responsible for
• Prioritise and maintain the sprint backlog for assigned products, balancing the requirements of clients and stakeholders
• Collaborate with Engineering teams to describe and deliver features and balance aspirational thinking with technical feasibility
• Manage planning sessions, backlog and release with engineering teams and relevant stakeholders
• ​Ensure timely execution of technical features in order to accommodate external deadlines

What you will need:

• 3-4 years experience as a Product Owner or Product Manager in a fintech, tech company, financial services company, or bank
• 2 years experience with payments (cross-border, account-to-account, FX)
• Experience building tech products at the heart of the action - working directly with engineers, talking to clients, engaging with internal stakeholders and external third parties, and progressing requirements through the end-to-end development lifecycle
• Experience building external and internal tech solutions (B2B2B/B2B2C)
• Experience working and building with API-first solutions, and familiarity with API concepts (cloud concepts are a nice to have but not essential)
• Experience working in an agile/scrum environment and continuously reviewing client and business needs, opportunities, priorities, milestones and deliverables, and compliance and operational risks
• Experience with client-centric development, and the ability to empathise with clients and users to deliver world-class user experiences and usability (UX/visual design skills are a nice to have but not essential)
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to understand and concisely explain complex concepts
• Strong organisational and problem-solving skills
• High self-motivation and the ability to manage your own time effectively
• The ability to collaborate effectively and continuously with colleagues to truly understand business and client goals and drive informed solutions
• The ability to speak and write English fluently

The interview process:

• Recruiter call
• Initial call with one of our Product team members
• Skills and domain assessment call with the CPO and CTO
• Cultural fit assessment with one of our Product team members and engineering tech leads

What we offer:

• 25 Days Holiday
• Vitality Health Care Plan
• Cycle-to-work scheme
• An individually tailored personal development plan and ongoing training
• Employee assistance programme
• Regular socials and relaxed working environment

Make a difference:

We are always on the lookout for talented individuals to help take us further - it’s important to us to hire the right people for roles that work for both us and the individual.

• Equality: We strive to create a workplace that reflects the diverse communities we serve and where everyone feels empowered to bring their full, authentic selves to work.
• Teamwork: The strength of our team does not only lie in our combined experience and expertise but our ability to trust each other, no matter what. We understand that our best work is not produced by individuals but by enjoying collaboration as a team and supporting each other every day.
• Quality: We provide award-winning solutions and unsurpassed service that, together, deliver premium value to our clients.
• Innovation: Redefining the standard of excellence is in everything we do. Therefore, we are open to ideas that challenge the conventional views and drive innovation. The only constant in life is change and we believe that in order to stay relevant we must continuously improve and evolve with the changing needs of society.
• Trust: We strive to act in a manner that builds trust with our team, clients, business partners, and other stakeholders. We firmly believe that actions speak louder than words and transparency is key.