Cape Town City Centre: Payment Manager

Job Purpose : Payment Manager is responsible to lead and oversee the company’s end-to-end payment operations, ensuring secure, efficient and scalable payment solutions across markets, while driving strategic initiatives, optimising performance, mitigating risks and delivering a seamless customer experience. Job Scope/ Responsibilities: Lead and manage the end-to-end payment function, driving payment strategy, partner selection, process optimisation, risk mitigation and regulatory compliance across multiple markets. • Oversee cross-functional teams and stakeholders, ensuring efficient payment operations, performance monitoring and actionable insights to support business growth and scalable, secure payment solutions. • Conduct in-depth assessments of payment landscapes in various markets to determine preferred methods, infrastructure capabilities and regulatory constraint. • Recommend payment solutions aligned with customer needs, business models and expansion plans. • Track emerging trends in digital payments, fintech innovation and regulatory changes that may impact business operations. • Identify, compare and evaluate potential payment service providers, acquirers and gateways based on reliability, cost, conversion rates, settlement cycles and integration complexity. • Lead the selection and onboarding of new payment partners to support product launches or market expansion • Collaborate with Product and IT teams to integrate new payment methods and optimise transaction routing • Work with the insights team to constantly analyse the performance of payment methods to ensure they are working efficiently. • Frequently report on the analytics of each payment method and reasons for their relative performance metrics. • Ensure payment systems operate with high uptime, strong authorisation rates and minimal transaction failures. • Continuously refine payment flows to improve customer experience and reduce friction. • Identify and monitor payment-related risks, including fraud, chargebacks, regulatory non-compliance and operational failures. • Work with Payment Processing teams to enforce AML/KYC requirements, data security standards and local regulatory frameworks. • Implement or enhance fraud detection tools, rules and monitoring processes. • Support commercial negotiations with payment service providers and vendors, ensuring favourable pricing, SLAs and service agreements. • Maintain strong relationships with payment partners and escalate issues to ensure timely resolution. • Evaluate payment service providers performance regularly and recommend optimisation or replacement when needed. • Analyse transaction data to identify trends, measure performance and provide insights that support commercial and operational decisions. • Use data to recommend improvements to payment routing, risk filters, and provider configurations. • Identify opportunities to reduce payment-related costs through improved routing, fee negotiations or alternative payment methods. • Streamline internal payment workflows, dispute processes and reconciliation activities. • Standardise payment practices across markets for scalability and efficiency. Partner with Processing teams to resolve payment issues and enhance troubleshooting processes. • Work with Finance teams to ensure accurate reconciliation, settlement tracking and dispute handling. • Support Product Marketing and Growth teams with insights on local payment preferences and conversion barriers. • Create SOP’s to sustainably manage the E-Payments area, its team, its responsibilities, its key stakeholders and all areas which pertain to the department. • Manage the payment processing team, fostering a high-performing, collaborative culture while driving accountability and professional development. Qualifications: B degree in Business/Finance/Information Systems or related field. Experience: • 8-10 years’ experience in digital payments, fintech, banking, e-commerce or financial operations • Experience working with payment gateways, PSPs, acquirers, or digital wallet providers for both Crypto and Fiat currencies. • Exposure to regulatory environments and compliance functions (e.g., AML, KYC, PCI)