Role Overview
We are seeking an experienced Business Development Manager – Merchant Acquisition / Payments to drive direct merchant acquisition and revenue growth across EEA, LATAM, Africa, and APAC. This role is primarily focused on identifying, pitching, and closing merchants with cross-border payment needs, particularly in sectors such as e-commerce, digital services, gaming, FX/OTC, fintech, and other high-growth online businesses.
The ideal candidate has strong experience in merchant acquiring, payments, fintech, or crypto payments, and a proven ability to build a qualified pipeline, win new merchants, and grow payment volume. This is a hunter role with a strong focus on direct sales, merchant expansion, and commercial execution, rather than partnership-led business development.
Key Responsibilities
1. Direct Merchant Acquisition
- Identify, prospect, and acquire direct merchants requiring payment acceptance, stablecoin settlement, or hybrid fiat-crypto payment solutions.
- Build and manage a strong pipeline of target merchants across priority verticals, including e-commerce, OTA, gaming, digital platforms, FX/OTC brokers, and fintech businesses.
- Lead the full sales cycle from outreach and solution pitching to commercial negotiation, onboarding, and go-live.
- Develop tailored payment propositions based on merchant needs, including acceptance methods, settlement options, processing flows, and cross-border coverage.
2. Merchant Growth & Revenue Expansion
- Drive new merchant signings, transaction volume growth, and revenue generation across assigned regions.
- Expand wallet share within acquired merchants by increasing payment method adoption, geographic coverage, and transaction use cases.
- Work closely with internal teams to improve merchant conversion, onboarding efficiency, and ongoing account performance.
- Maintain a strong understanding of merchant unit economics, payment conversion, approval rates, chargeback risks, and settlement structures to support sustainable portfolio growth.
3. Commercial Execution & Market Development
- Execute go-to-market plans to penetrate high-potential merchant segments and regional corridors across EU, LATAM, Africa, and APAC.
- Gather market intelligence on merchant needs, competitor offerings, pricing, and local payment trends, and translate insights into stronger commercial positioning.
- Prepare commercial proposals, pricing structures, and business cases to support deal closure and long-term merchant value.
- Represent the company in merchant-facing meetings, industry events, and sales discussions to strengthen market presence and lead generation.
4. Cross-Functional Collaboration
- Partner with product, compliance, risk, and operations teams to ensure merchant onboarding, KYC/KYB, settlement setup, and payment flows are aligned with client requirements and internal controls.
- Support merchants during integration and implementation, working with internal technical teams to ensure a smooth onboarding and launch process.
- Provide merchant feedback to help refine product features, onboarding flows, settlement options, and risk controls.
Qualifications
- 3–5+ years of experience in business development, merchant sales, or commercial roles within payments, merchant acquiring, fintech, or crypto payments.
- Proven track record of direct merchant acquisition , pipeline development, and closing revenue-generating deals.
- Strong network among online merchants, cross-border businesses, payment users, or high-growth digital verticals such as e-commerce, gaming, digital services, fintech, or broker platforms.
- Solid understanding of merchant acquiring, payment acceptance, cross-border payments, settlement flows, merchant onboarding, and payment risk management .
- Experience selling payment solutions involving cards, local payment methods, wallet funding, stablecoin settlement, or fiat-crypto payment flows is highly preferred.
- Strong commercial negotiation skills and the ability to manage complex sales processes across multiple stakeholders.
- Ability to work effectively with product, compliance, AML/KYC, risk, and operations teams to onboard and launch merchants successfully.
- Fluent in English