Senior Manager, Lead risk advisor for Central Europe

About Us
Visa is a world leader in payments technology, facilitating transactions between consumers, merchants, financial institutions and government entities across more than 200 countries and territories, dedicated to uplifting everyone, everywhere by being the best way to pay and be paid.

At Visa, you'll have the opportunity to create impact at scale — tackling meaningful challenges, growing your skills and seeing your contributions impact lives around the world.

Join Visa and do work that matters – to you, to your community, and to the world. Progress starts with you.

Pay Transparency

Job Description

As Senior Risk Manager, Central Europe, you will play a critical role in protecting the integrity, trust, and resilience of the payments ecosystem across Central Europe (CE). You will lead Strategic Risk Management and Ecosystem Risk (Fraud and Data Security) for Central European markets and strategic clients, partnering closely with Visa’s regional leadership, product teams, data & analytics, government engagement, and regulatory stakeholders.

This role combines deep subject‑matter expertise in fraud and payments risk with the ability to influence senior stakeholders, translate complex risk into clear business insights and embed risk capabilities that enable safe growth and innovation.

As the Senior Risk Manager, Central Europe, you will support the delivery of Visa’s risk strategy for Central European strategic clients, helping them strengthen fraud mitigation, secure controls and ecosystem resilience. You will work closely with the Cluster Risk Managers, Visa Consulting & Analytics (VCA), Product, Government Engagement and regulatory teams to advance a trusted and secure payments environment across multiple European markets.

This role is ideal for a risk professional who can operate across markets, synthesise insights, and influence diverse stakeholders while working within an established Risk Management framework.

Key responsibilities include:

Visa owns the most recognizable global brand in the financial services industry. Maintaining trust in that brand and differentiating Visa from competitors will be the Risk leader’s key responsibilities. Risk management is one of the key pillars of Visa’s strategy. With in-market ownership of this strategy, the Sr Risk Manager, CE plays a critical role to support the enterprise and operational risk activities of the company. 

Key Accountabilities:

• Support delivery of Visa’s risk strategy
  • Contribute to the execution of regional risk plans aligned with market needs and Visa’s global risk strategy. Lead delivery of Visa’s Central Europe risk strategy, aligned with Visa’s global risk framework and local market needs
  • Under the direction of the respective Head of Risk in Europe, the role has responsibility for fraud prevention, fraud management, security and risk in the external Visa payment infrastructure in multiple CE countries.
  • Support business development of fraud services strategy, activities, and products by articulating current risk control environment, assist in assessing any new risks that may arise from new strategy and consider these in the wider context of the overarching risk appetite
  • Maintain awareness of emerging risks, regulatory developments and ecosystem trends affecting Central Europe
  • Support internal and external risk management programs, including key client risk reviews and risk forums.
• Risk advisory & client engagement
  • As a key member of the market Risk team, this role will act as a trusted risk advisor to Visa’s Central European Country Managers, market executive teams, in addition to hub and global functional leads on strategies related to complex operational, financial, legal and regulatory risk exposures
  • Provide guidance to clients on fraud prevention, secure technology, dispute/fraud trends and payment integrity
  • Promote and support client adoption of Visa risk and fraud solutions, tools and best practices. Translate risk insights into actionable recommendations
  • Help assess and communicate the implications of new payment models, innovations and business strategies.
• Support fraud incident response
  • Assist in the management and coordination of significant fraud events and data breach activities for CE clients, including analysis, reporting and follow‑up actions.
  • Liaise with Visa security and fraud SMEs, as well as client risk leads, to support timely response and resolution.
• Cross‑functional engagement & Collaboration
  • Support business development and embedding of Visa’s fraud services by articulating the current risk control environment and identifying new or emerging risks.
  • Support the preparation of risk materials for internal governance forums, industry working groups and selected external engagements.
  • Contribute to risk thought leadership, client education and ecosystem-wide risk awareness initiatives
  • Form key stakeholder relationships across Visa Europe and global functions to develop an in depth understanding of the current end-to-end risk client lifecycle including onboarding, credit risk and ecosystem risk monitoring. Provide recommendations to tailor the existing client lifecycle to meet specific opportunities for fraud services.
  • Support, train and provide strategic direction on fraud services to the Ecosystem Risk team in their scaled client engagements including SME advice on any large-scale client outreach strategy, complex client queries and client facing materials that can be used in client educational sessions, client bank forums, wider industry and sector audiences as needed.
  • Collaborate with Visa Government Engagement, Regulatory and Policy teams on risk‑related matters affecting CE clients.
• Data & Analytics, Reporting and Insight Generation
  • Work with Data & Analytics teams to analyse fraud trends, identify root causes and propose mitigation actions.
  • Prepare concise risk reports, dashboards and briefings for senior stakeholders and client leadership.
  • Synthesise complex data and market intelligence to inform strategy execution and product improvements.

Visa requires at least 3 days in office, expectations of these days will be confirmed by your Hiring Manager.

Qualifications

Essential Skills:

• Expert knowledge and 7 years-experience in Risk Management, Fraud prevention a related field, with a proven track record of managing fraud risks.
• Minimum 2 years’ experience in engaging and advising clients to adopt risk management best practices that will accelerate the sound growth of their payment business; knowledge of fraud monitoring tools, data security principles and cyber‑risk concepts.
• Experience working with issuers, acquirers, processors, payment facilitators or fintechs
• Strong analytical capability with the ability to interpret complex data and identify meaningful risk insights.
• Excellent communication, influencing and stakeholder‑management skills.

Fraud and Risk management experience:

• Strong understanding of the Central European payments and financial services landscape, including regulatory, market, and technology trends.
• Expert knowledge of designing solutions to protect against advanced fraud threats.
• Deep understanding of fraud prevention techniques, tools and best practices (including data security and cyber-risk concepts)
• Track record of successfully identifying and managing enterprise and operational risk for a complex, global company in the financial services sector
• Expert understanding of fraud and risk technologies and capabilities that assist in fraud monitoring, controls, fraud reduction, fraud exploit identification to reduce financial risk
• Experience overseeing the implementation of fraud solutions in financial/payments environments.

Strong analytical skills:

• Ability to interpret complex data and identify trends, risks and opportunities; technical proficiency in using dashboard and data analytics tools
• Intellectually curious: finds stories in the data, asks the right questions, demonstrated track record of mining data and intelligence for impactful insights
• Excellent understanding at a strategic and operational level of the complex risks facing the business
• Solution-oriented mindset: uses data to drill down to root cause to assess the severity of the risk, the cost of the remediation and develops an appropriate action plan
• Excellent problem-solving skills, strong communication and leadership abilities (focused on driving results)
• Demonstrated thought leadership and the ability to think creatively to solve unstructured problems

Client engagement:

• Established reputation for building peer-like relationships with senior client and partner leaders and being able to persuasively communicate and influence other teams
• Experience engaging and influencing stakeholders across functions or markets.
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills with the ability to engage and collaborate with clients and stakeholders at all levels
• Strong strategic thinking and critical thinking skills with the ability to align risk management efforts with the business objectives
• Proven influencing skills and ability manage a varied set of matrixed stakeholders effectively
• Experience identifying and communicating current and emerging security threat

Communication and collaboration:

• Proven experience of leading and engaging multiple stakeholders, particularly senior leadership of internal and external clients, on a given strategy or risk capability
• Track record in synthesizing complex information to produce impactful management information and analysis, and support informed executive decision making
• Experienced in preparing/reviewing/delivering executive level communications, both written and verbally; expert presentation skills and ability to communicate clearly at all levels of management, including interaction with executive decision makers
• Proven ability to build credible-long term effective working relationships, both internally and externally

Preferred

• Exposure to incident response, fraud event handling, or regulatory engagement.
• Background in Risk, Compliance, FinCrime or similar corporate control functions.
• Experience collaborating with law enforcement or regulatory bodies is a plus.
• Industry certifications such as CISSP, Security +, CEH, CFE, etc.

Visa is an EEO Employer

Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability or protected veteran status. Visa will also consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with EEOC guidelines and applicable local law.

Visa welcome and encourages application from persons with disabilities. Accommodations are available on request for candidates taking part in all aspects of the selection process.