Senior Counsel

About the Role
The company is seeking an experienced senior lawyer to provide comprehensive, end-to-end strategic legal support to the Core Payments business across Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EEMEA). The role will serve as a senior legal partner to regional Core Payments leadership, helping shape business strategy, product development, commercialization, and region-wide pricing initiatives.
The successful candidate will be a payments- and technology-minded lawyer with strong executive presence, sound commercial judgment, and extensive product and transactional experience. The role requires the ability to engage at both strategic and tactical levels, anticipate legal and regulatory issues, influence decision-making, and translate complex risks into clear, practical guidance.

Key Responsibilities

• Act as a trusted strategic advisor to EEMEA Core Payments leadership and relevant regional and global stakeholders on business priorities, product strategy, commercialization models, and material legal and reputational risks.
• Provide strategic legal oversight across the lifecycle of Core Payments products and initiatives, from concept, design, and regional assessment through market enablement, launch, scaling, enhancement, and discontinuation.
• Lead the legal review of EEMEA-wide Core Payments pricing and interchange initiatives, including the legal assessment of proposed pricing models, fee constructs, bundling, opt-in and opt-out structures, customer impact, communications, and implementation considerations.
• Advise on the legal and regulatory dimensions of pricing proposals and provide clear, risk-balanced recommendations to inform relevant regional and global governance and approval processes.
• Shape regional legal positions and guardrails for complex or novel Core Payments initiatives, promoting consistency across EEMEA while recognizing market-specific legal and regulatory requirements.
• Provide strategic challenge to business proposals, identify alternatives and controls, and help senior stakeholders make well-informed decisions in areas of legal uncertainty or heightened regulatory attention.
• Lead or coordinate high-profile, cross-border and sensitive matters, including engagement with senior business leaders, specialist counsel, market legal teams, and external counsel.

Support Core Payments portfolios across EEMEA, including:

• Consumer products
• Core network and processing solutions
• Digital payments
• Authentication
• Tokenization
• Card products
• Cardholder solutions and related commercialization initiatives

Collaborate with

• Regional Core Payments leadership
• Pricing, finance, global product
• Sales, business development, customer delivery
• Technology, franchise, regulatory
• Compliance, privacy, intellectual property
• Public policy, communications and market business and legal teams

Manage:

• Strategic pricing proposals for legal, competition, consumer protection, regulatory, contractual, and reputational considerations, and coordinate market-specific analysis where required.
• Development of defensible rationales, customer propositions, contractual frameworks, and communications for new or revised fees, product bundles, and regional pricing programs.
• Oversee or handle complex commercial and technology agreements, including customer, partnership, vendor, and platform arrangements, product terms, enrollment forms, addenda and statements of work.
• Lead regional legal assessments, legal scans, and product governance processes, ensuring timely coordination with market counsel and legal subject-matter experts.
• Build strong relationships with global product counsel and other regions, promote alignment of legal positions, and adapt global frameworks and templates for EEMEA implementation.
• Develop scalable legal frameworks, playbooks, templates, and training that improve consistency, transparency, and speed of execution across EEMEA.
• Provide senior-level guidance, coaching, and quality oversight to lawyers and legal resources supporting Core Payments matters, without implying formal people-management responsibility.
• Manage external counsel strategically and efficiently, including scoping, selection, instruction, quality oversight, and budget management.
• Escalate material issues appropriately and ensure compliance with the company policies, governance standards, and record-keeping requirements.

All About You

• Qualified senior lawyer in one or more jurisdictions, with a strong academic and professional training background.
• Extensive experience in payments, financial services, fintech, technology, product, and commercial legal matters, preferably gained through a combination of in-house and leading private-practice experience.
• Demonstrated record of providing strategic legal advice to senior business leaders and influencing complex, high-impact decisions across multiple jurisdictions.
• Strong understanding of payment networks, product development, commercialization, and pricing; experience reviewing pricing, fee, or interchange initiatives is highly advantageous.
• Sophisticated knowledge of competition, consumer protection, financial services regulation, and contractual risk as they relate to payment products and pricing structures, with the judgment to coordinate specialist advice where necessary.
• Advanced drafting and negotiation skills, including experience with complex technology, customer, vendor, partnership, and product agreements.
• Ability to understand complex products, data flows, technologies, and economic models, identify the issues that matter, and develop pragmatic, risk-balanced solutions.
• Excellent executive communication and stakeholder-management skills, with the credibility to advise, challenge, and influence senior legal and business leadership.
• Proven ability to lead cross-functional and cross-border matters in a dynamic matrix environment, manage ambiguity, and deliver under competing priorities and tight deadlines.
• Collaborative, curious, proactive, and solutions-oriented, with sound judgment, high integrity, and strong attention to detail.
• Fluency in English is required; additional EEMEA language capability is an advantage.

Working Style and Scope
This role is based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and supports stakeholders across EEMEA. The role requires collaboration across jurisdictions and time zones and may involve business travel. Responsibilities may evolve with the needs of the business, and the above list is intended as a guide rather than an exhaustive list.

Corporate Security Responsibility
All activities involving access to the company assets, information, and networks come with an inherent risk to the organization; therefore, every person working for or on behalf of the company is responsible for information security and must:

• Abide by the company’s security policies and practices;
• Ensure the confidentiality and integrity of the information being accessed;
• Report any suspected information security violation or breach, and
• Complete all periodic mandatory security trainings in accordance with the company’s guidelines.