About the role
Help merchants improve card payment success through payment expertise, data analysis, and practical execution. You will investigate performance issues, identify optimisation opportunities, and work with merchants and internal teams to deliver measurable improvements across domestic and cross-border card payments.
As AI takes on more monitoring and diagnosis, you will apply domain knowledge and analytical judgement to validate findings, prioritise actions, and drive implementation. You will also help improve our AI tools by feeding investigation outcomes and payment expertise back into the system.
Responsibilities
- Analyse payment performance: Monitor authorisation and payment success rates across merchants, markets, issuers, and payment flows. Investigate root causes and distinguish underlying performance issues from changes in transaction mix.
- Identify optimisation opportunities: Develop recommendations across authentication, authorisation, routing, retries, and card credentials, balancing conversion gains with fraud risk and processing costs.
- Guide AI-assisted diagnosis: Critically evaluate AI-generated findings, challenge assumptions, and investigate cases where evidence is incomplete or merchant context requires further judgement.
- Drive implementation: Work with product, engineering, risk, data science, and commercial teams to prioritise opportunities and take improvements from analysis through rollout.
- Validate impact: Define success metrics, support experiments and A/B tests, and assess whether changes deliver meaningful improvements. Recommend when to scale, adjust, or stop an initiative.
- Communicate insights: Present findings and recommendations clearly to merchants and internal stakeholders, adapting the level of detail to technical and business audiences.
- Build reusable capabilities: Turn investigation outcomes into dashboards, playbooks, and knowledge that improve both team effectiveness and the accuracy of AI-powered tools.
- Apply market knowledge: Track relevant scheme updates, issuer behaviour, and industry developments. Work with payment partners to investigate unfamiliar issues and translate findings into practical actions.
Requirements
- 3+ years of relevant experience in card payments, payment optimisation, acquiring, or payments analytics, gained at a PSP, acquirer, merchant, card scheme, or payments consultancy.
- Strong knowledge of card payments, including the roles of merchants, PSPs, acquirers, schemes, and issuers, and how authentication, authorisation, and declines affect payment success.
- Hands-on data processing and analytical skills, including SQL proficiency and the ability to independently extract, validate, and analyse transaction-level data.
- Strong analytical judgement: Able to test hypotheses, challenge AI-generated findings, recognise data limitations, distinguish correlation from causation, and determine when further investigation is needed.
- Data visualisation skills, with experience using tools such as Tableau, Power BI, or Looker to communicate trends and support decisions.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English, with the ability to synthesise complex findings, explain technical concepts clearly, and present practical recommendations.
- Demonstrated ability to structure ambiguous problems, prioritise actions based on expected impact, and work across teams to deliver results.
Preferred qualifications
- Experience improving e-commerce or cross-border card payment performance, with measurable results.
- Practical experience with areas such as 3DS, network tokens, account updater, stored credentials, routing, or decline recovery.
- Experience with Python, statistical analysis, or experiment design.
- Experience using or improving AI-powered analytical tools, including validating outputs and providing structured feedback.
- Experience presenting payment insights and recommendations directly to merchants.
- Mandarin proficiency is a plus for collaboration with China-based stakeholders.