Senior Payments Consultant

Liberty Towers; Greater London; On-site; GBP 70,000 - 110,000; Full time

Job summary

Liberty Towers is recruiting a Senior Payments Consultant to help businesses understand payment performance, identify opportunities to improve acceptance, and reduce costs. You will analyze transaction data and explain findings to senior decision-makers, guiding evidence-based recommendations and strategic roadmaps.

You will lead discussions with clients on commercial priorities, review fees and authentication costs, and translate analysis into practical improvement plans for high-volume online

Qualifications

• Extensive payments consulting experience (6+ years)
• Detailed knowledge of interchange, scheme fees and payment costs
• Strong understanding of 3DS and Strong Customer Authentication
• Hands-on experience analysing transaction-level data and merchant statements
• Track record building robust financial models and explaining assumptions
• Confidence presenting complex findings to senior clients

Responsibilities

• Assess payment performance and benchmark against market standards.
• Identify and evaluate improvements to acceptance and cost efficiency.
• Build business cases with financial models and clear documentation.
• Present findings and recommendations to senior stakeholders.

Skills

Payments consulting

Data analysis

Commercial judgement

Stakeholder presentation

Financial modelling

Client facing

Job description

We are recruiting on behalf of a payments business for a Senior Payments Consultant with strong technical knowledge, analytical skills and commercial judgement.

In this client-facing role, you will help businesses understand how their payments are performing, identify opportunities to improve acceptance and reduce costs, and build evidence-based recommendations. You will need to be comfortable working with detailed transaction data and explaining your findings to senior decision-makers.

Key responsibilities

Assess payment performance

• Lead client discussions to understand their payment arrangements, commercial priorities and operational challenges.
• Analyse transaction data, merchant statements and processing costs to establish a clear picture of current performance.
• Review acquiring arrangements, interchange and scheme fees, payment methods, authentication and foreign exchange costs.
• Compare performance with relevant market benchmarks and identify areas requiring further investigation.

Identify and evaluate improvements

• Investigate authorisation rates and decline patterns to identify opportunities to increase successful payments.
• Assess opportunities to optimise payment fees, improve authentication outcomes and reduce avoidable costs.
• Quantify the potential impact of proposed changes, distinguishing realistic improvements from unsupported assumptions.
• Prioritise recommendations according to their commercial value and practical feasibility.

Build business cases

• Develop financial and return-on-investment models using client data.
• Clearly document assumptions, calculations and dependencies.
• Translate complex analysis into business cases and practical improvement roadmaps.
• Explain and defend your findings when challenged by client finance, technology or treasury teams.
• Present findings and recommendations to senior stakeholders, including finance and technology leaders.
• Work with client teams to validate the analysis before recommendations are finalised.
• Act as a subject matter expert throughout consulting engagements.
• Contribute insights to internal benchmarking resources and help improve consulting approaches.

Experience and skills

• Substantial experience in payments consulting, payments strategy, acquiring, payment service providers or payment cost optimisation, ideally six years or more.
• Detailed knowledge of interchange, scheme fees and the commercial factors affecting payment costs.
• A strong understanding of authorisation processes, transaction declines and payment authentication, including 3DS and Strong Customer Authentication.
• Hands‑on experience analysing transaction‑level data and merchant statements.
• A track record of building robust financial models and explaining the assumptions behind them.
• Confidence presenting complex findings to senior clients and answering detailed questions.
• Strong analytical thinking, commercial judgement and attention to detail.
• The ability to turn technical findings into clear, practical recommendations.

Experience with high-volume online payments, payment benchmarking or foreign exchange cost analysis would be particularly useful.