Product Lead - Payments Schemes
Chase International is scaling across the UK and Europe. As a Payments Product Manager you will drive delivery and take ownership of payments capabilities—taking complex work already in flight through clean launch, operational readiness, and stable production outcomes, and then shaping the next wave of payments expansion.
Payments Product Manager role owns end-to-end delivery and performance of payment capabilities with strong understanding across scheme rulebooks, ISO 20022/message specifications, routing/fallback design, settlement/liquidity constraints, and core banking posting/reconciliation, and lead stakeholders through ambiguity with clear trade-offs/escalations. The role has front to back accountabilities spanning customer experiences, orchestration, scheme and messaging reality, technology delivery, and operations. You will bring structure to ambiguity, manage dependencies and trade-offs, and communicate clearly up and down the organisation. This role requires deep payments domain expertise, (it is not a generic feature PM role).
Job Responsibilities
- Own the assigned payments product and feature delivery across releases delivering great customer experiences whilst balancing regulatory obligations, scheme operating rules/rulebooks, engineering constraints, and cost-to-serve.
- Serves as a subject matter expert on European payments, translating scheme and regulatory requirements into buildable, testable requirements, and owns the end-to-end testing approach (including negative testing and resilience scenarios), ensuring evidence-quality coverage and readiness for operational sign-off, including message-level requirements (ISO 20022 pain/pacs/camt concepts), reason codes/status reporting, end-to-end reconciliation, and operational exception handling.
- Monitors payment landscape and trends and identifies opportunities for roadmap adjustment and product differentiation, including emerging rails and initiatives, scheme rulebook changes, ISO 20022 evolution, and regulatory updates impacting processing/SLAs/consumer outcomes.
- Directs the end-to-end product delivery journey—intake, release management, product operationalisation, delivery feasibility/go‑no‑go decision-making, and post-launch performance reporting—driving efficiency and cross-functional coordination, including scheme readiness (certification where applicable), operational runbooks, MI, and evidence-quality controls.
- Proactively identifies risks, issues, dependencies, and blockers; maintains visibility of timelines and critical paths; ensures adequate resourcing; and escalates when needed with clear options, impacts, and recommended paths, including explicit trade-offs across customer experience, scheme compliance, operational risk, and resilience.
- Partners with Digital Product/Design and Operations to ensure platform capabilities enable strong customer payment journeys (happy path plus exceptions), including transparency/status, notifications, and support/Ops handoffs, without assuming sole ownership of the full in-app experience, and ensures exceptions reflect payments reality (reject/return/recall/chargeback-like dispute processes, investigations, cut-offs, and settlement timing).
- Owns product performance, defines and tracks OKRs/KPIs aligned to organisational goals (e.g., delivery predictability, availability/success rates, latency/SLA/SLO adherence, defect/incident trends including MTTR and recurrence), and is accountable for prioritising and investing in enhancements to achieve stable production outcomes, including monitoring of reject/return rates, investigation volumes/aging, liquidity/settlement-related failures, and reconciliation breaks.
- Leads vendor/partner governance where applicable, including SLA performance management, QBR cadence, remediation plans, escalation paths, and structured recommendations on build vs buy / change requests, including sponsor/connectivity constraints, scheme change delivery, and operational performance obligations.
- Coaches and mentors product managers and delivery leads (via line management where applicable and/or squad leadership), raising the bar on delivery craft, requirements quality, and operational ownership, with particular focus on payments domain depth, precision in requirements, and “production-first” mindset.
- Leverages AI-enabled tools responsibly to improve requirements development, test planning, incident/MI insights, stakeholder communications, and reporting—while maintaining appropriate controls, documentation, and auditability.
- Owns/defines payments orchestration and routing behaviours for your scope: qualification rules, routing decisions, fallbacks, retries/timeouts, idempotency, duplication controls, and clear lifecycle state models that support auditability and customer/Ops outcomes.
- Partners with core banking/ledger teams to ensure accurate posting, balances impacts, transaction codes/classification, reversals/adjustments handling, and end-to-end reconciliation from initiation through clearing/settlement and customer reporting.
- Understands and manages settlement and liquidity constraints (e.g., cut-off times, settlement cycles, prefunding/positioning impacts where relevant) and ensures product behaviour, customer messaging, and ops processes reflect reality.
Qualifications, Skills and Experience
- 7+ years of product management / product delivery experience in financial services (bank, PSP, scheme, or regulated fintech), with material hands-on payments delivery accountability.
- Proven track record launching and running payments capabilities end-to-end in a regulated, audited environment, including operational readiness, MI, controls evidence, incident ownership, and production stability improvements.
- Strong SEPA domain knowledge and practical understanding of the European payments landscape, including scheme operating rules, ISO 20022 message fundamentals, cut-offs, returns/rejects/investigations, and settlement timing impacts.
- Demonstrable ability to work at message/spec level (not just concepts): comfortable with mapping fields, interpreting scheme implementation guidelines, and translating into precise acceptance criteria and test cases.
- Customer-outcome mindset with the ability to influence journey design without direct ownership, including transparent customer messaging for payment status/outcomes and exception scenarios.
- Technical fluency sufficient to lead delivery with engineering and architecture teams (APIs/events, payment state models, resilience/observability fundamentals), plus routing/fallback/retry patterns and reconciliation/ledger integration concepts.
- Proven matrix leadership: able to drive decisions and manage stakeholders across functions and seniority levels.
- Comfortable operating in ambiguity and fast-moving environments.
- Practical familiarity with AI-enabled tools in a controlled, auditable context.
- Strong understanding of settlement, liquidity, and operational controls as they impact payment success, customer outcomes, and incident patterns.