Cape Town City Centre: Payment Manager

About the Role

The Payment Manager role is a critical position that oversees the company’s end-to-end payment operations, ensuring secure, efficient, and scalable payment solutions across markets. The successful candidate will lead strategic initiatives, optimise performance, mitigate risks, and deliver a seamless customer experience.

Key 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 constraints.
• 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.

Requirements

• B degree in Business/Finance/Information Systems or related field.
• 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).

Qualifications

No qualifications mentioned in the original job description.

Salary & Benefits

No salary information is provided in the original job description.