About the Role:
The Advisory team collaborates closely with banks and financial institutions to design, launch, optimize, and scale card issuing and consumer financing propositions. This role focuses on leveraging payments domain expertise, data-driven insights, and commercial advisory to assist issuers in enhancing portfolio profitability, customer acquisition, and product performance across credit, debit, prepaid, EPP, and BNPL solutions. The candidate will engage in end-to-end advisory projects, encompassing new card program launches, portfolio diagnostics, revenue and cost optimization, scheme economics, and advanced analytics-led use cases. Strong cross-functional collaboration with product, technology, data, and commercial teams is essential.
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Responsibilities:
- Support go-to-market (GTM) strategy and readiness assessments for new and existing card issuers and acquirers, including product proposition, underwriting alignment, merchant segmentation, pricing, acceptance strategy, and launch planning.
- Conduct issuer and merchant acquiring portfolio diagnostics and financial analysis covering interchange, merchant service charges, scheme fees, non-compliance fees, EPP economics, acquiring margins, and portfolio P&L optimization.
- Lead and contribute to revenue assurance, pricing optimization, and scheme cost optimization initiatives for issuing banks and merchant acquirers.
- Support the design and rollout of value-added issuing solutions such as EPP 2.0, BNPL, installment products, and card-linked financing.
- Work with data and product teams on analytics and AI-led advisory use cases, including card recommendation engines, issuer and merchant scorecards, and performance dashboards.
- Analyze merchant acquiring performance across total payment volume (TPV), transaction value and count, active merchant and terminal base, average ticket value, merchant service charge yield, net revenue, scheme and processing costs, and profitability.
- Develop merchant lifecycle and portfolio analytics covering merchant acquisition, activation, retention, churn, reactivation, like-to-like growth, share of wallet, and cohort performance.
- Segment acquiring portfolios by merchant, MID, MCC, industry cluster, merchant size, geography, channel (POS/e-commerce), card origin, card product, and scheme to identify growth opportunities and performance gaps.
- Assess merchant concentration, seasonality, refund and reversal patterns, approval and decline rates, cross-border activity, and unusual performance movements to support commercial, operational, and risk decisions.
- Translate acquiring analytics into actionable merchant strategies, including pricing, sales targeting, portfolio interventions, acceptance expansion, and value-added service opportunities.
- Develop client-facing materials (business cases, proposals, whitepapers, and presentations) to support advisory engagements and sales motions.
- Coordinate with internal stakeholders (Sales, Product, Technology, Data, Schemes) to ensure successful execution and delivery of advisory outcomes.
- Track KPIs, financial impact, and post-launch performance to demonstrate measurable value delivered to issuers and acquirers.
Qualifications:
- 3 to 5 years of experience in a similar role.
- Strong understanding of card issuing and merchant acquiring economics, including interchange, merchant service charges, acquiring margins, scheme and processing fees, authorization flows, compliance fees, and portfolio profitability.
- Proficiency in data analysis and coding, with hands-on experience in Python, R, and SQL for data extraction, analysis, automation, and building analytical models.
- Hands-on experience working with acquiring transaction data, merchant hierarchies, MIDs, MCCs, authorization and settlement data, and BI tools such as Power BI is preferred.
- Experience in card issuing, merchant acquiring, credit cards, consumer financing, BNPL, EPP, or payments consulting roles.
- Ability to perform financial modeling, business case development, and large-scale transaction and merchant-level data analysis to support decision-making.
- Proven capability to translate complex data insights into actionable recommendations for issuers, acquirers, and merchant-facing commercial teams.
- Strong stakeholder management and communication skills, with experience working across functions.
This organization is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome and encourage applications from candidates of all backgrounds, nationalities, and experience levels. We are committed to creating an inclusive workplace where innovation, diversity, and performance thrive.
