About the Role
This role owns the acquiring business end to end: its growth, its margin, and its setup. The Manager sets the acquiring strategy, manages the acquiring banks, processors, and card schemes behind it, and ensures that every merchant signed is priced, onboarded, settled, and monitored correctly. This role does not manage a sales team directly but equips sales teams with the necessary pricing, propositions, and products. It entails collaboration with Business Intelligence on data and deal economics and with Product on new acquiring products.
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Responsibilities
1. Acquiring Strategy and Performance
- Own the acquiring business plan and budget across SME and Strategic Account Acquiring: TPV, revenue, take rate, cost of acceptance, and margin.
- Set targets by segment and channel with the sales managers and track delivery monthly.
- Lead the move from using third-party acquirers to acquiring in its own right, including the merchant and sub-merchant (payment facilitator) model and MID strategy.
- Report acquiring performance, risks, and actions to the Director – Commercials and leadership.
2. Acquirer, Processor, and Scheme Management
- Manage relationships and contracts with acquiring banks, processors, gateways (such as MPGS), and card schemes (Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Jaywan).
- Negotiate acquiring and processing costs, and drive smart routing to lower the cost of acceptance.
- Own scheme compliance for acquiring: MCC assignment, scheme rules, chargeback and fraud thresholds, and required certifications, with Risk and Compliance.
- Work with CBUAE-facing teams on the regulatory requirements for acquiring.
3. Pricing and Propositions
- Own the acquiring rate cards by MCC, card type, channel (e-commerce, POS, SoftPOS), and domestic or international cards.
- Approve deal pricing for strategic and SME merchants within agreed margin floors, using deal economics prepared with Business Intelligence.
- Build acquiring propositions and support the sales teams on key deals, client meetings, and RFPs.
- Track realized versus list pricing and margin per merchant segment and act on low-margin merchants.
4. Merchant Onboarding, Risk, and Operations
- Set the merchant onboarding policy with Risk and Compliance: KYB, underwriting, MCC classification, and risk tiers.
- Keep onboarding fast: target turnaround time from signed contract to live merchant, including terminal and gateway setup.
- Oversee settlement, reconciliation, chargebacks, and fraud monitoring with Operations and Finance.
- Manage the POS, SoftPOS, and ECR partner set-up, including integration partners such as POS software providers.
5. Product Development
- Work with Product on the acquiring roadmap: payment gateway, POS, SoftPOS, Pay by Link, DCC, Amex acceptance, tokenization, BNPL, and alternative payment methods.
- Write business requirements and business cases for new acquiring products and features.
- Plan launches and go-to-market with the sales teams, tracking adoption and revenue after launch.
6. Sales Enablement
- Train the SME and Strategic Account sales teams on acquiring products, pricing, and onboarding.
- Provide the sales teams with the necessary tools: rate cards, proposition templates, product sheets, and onboarding checklists.
- Support the SME Acquiring Manager on partner channels, including Outsourced Sales Partners.
Education
- Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Computer Science, Finance, Business or a related field.
- An MBA or payments certifications (for example Visa or Mastercard programmes) are an advantage.
Experience
- 8–12 years in merchant acquiring with a bank, acquirer, PSP, or payment facilitator.
- Have owned an acquiring P&L, product line, or major merchant portfolio.
- Experienced in managing acquiring banks, processors, or schemes, including contract and cost negotiations.
- Experience setting up a new acquiring business, license, or payment facilitator model is strongly advantageous.
- UAE or GCC acquiring experience, including with government merchants, is a strong advantage.
Technical and Payments Knowledge
- Knowledge of card transaction flows end to end: authorization, clearing, settlement, chargebacks, and reconciliation.
- Understanding of acquiring economics: interchange, scheme fees, MDR, interchange++ pricing, acquirer and processing costs.
- Familiarity with gateways, 3DS, tokenization, POS and SoftPOS terminals, ECR integrations, and PCI DSS requirements.
- Proficient in scheme rules and merchant risk: MCC, KYB and underwriting, chargeback and fraud monitoring programmes.
- Awareness of payment facilitator and sub-merchant models, and local payment methods such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, Aani, and BNPL.
Skills
- Strong commercial judgment: understands merchant value and profitable deal structures.
- Excellent negotiation skills with banks, processors, schemes, and large merchants.
- Ability to lead through influence: achieves results from teams in sales, product, operations, and risk without direct management.
- Strong writing and presentation skills; able to develop business cases, propositions, and management reports.
- Fluent in English; Arabic language skills are an advantage.
