About the Role
This role turns data and market knowledge into commercial decisions for the organization, influencing pricing strategies, client acquisition, and profitability. It serves as the commercial team's primary source of truth for competitor intelligence, pricing, client profitability, and performance tracking across Acquiring, Issuance, and Wallet services. The ideal candidate will possess a strong technical foundation in payment gateways, merchant acquiring, and card issuing.
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Key Responsibilities
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Competitive Benchmarking and Market Intelligence
- Build and maintain a benchmark of UAE and regional competitors across acquiring, payment gateways, card issuance, and wallets, including pricing, products, payment methods, third-party partners, onboarding time, and service levels.
- Track market and emerging trends, regulations (CBUAE, schemes, e-invoicing, WPS), and new entrants, translating insights into clear implications for the organization.
- Gather customer needs from sales interactions, client meetings, and lost deals to inform product and pricing strategies.
- Publish a quarterly market and competitor update for both the commercial and leadership teams.
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Analytics, KPI Tracking, and Reporting
- Build regular reports and dashboards from the data lake, collaborating with the Data and IT teams on data requirements, definitions, and quality.
- Define and track commercial KPIs, including TPV, transactions, revenue, take rate, margin, active and inactive merchants, active wallets, and pipeline conversion.
- Create and maintain a profitability view for each client and segment, detailing revenue, cost of sale, partner share, and cost to serve.
- Identify loss-making or low-margin clients and propose necessary actions like repricing or cost renegotiation.
- Monitor the commercial impact of initiatives such as smart routing, new pricing, and new product launches, while explaining variances against budget and forecast.
- Support the annual budget and business plan with projections for volumes, revenue, and margin drivers.
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Pricing and Deal Support
- Maintain the organization's rate cards and pricing models for acquiring (by MCC, card type, domestic or international, e-commerce or POS), issuance, and wallet services.
- Model deal economics before issuing quotes, analyzing interchange, scheme fees, acquirer and partner costs, along with the resulting margin.
- Recommend price points and floors for strategic deals and partner channels, tracking realized pricing against list pricing.
- Assist in the preparation of client propositions, presentations, and business cases for strategic government and enterprise clients.
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Team Development
- As the function grows, mentor 1-2 analysts, establishing standards for data definitions, report formats, and model documentation.
Requirements
- Education:
- Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Computer Science, Finance, Economics, or a related field.
- Payments certifications (e.g., Visa or Mastercard programs) are an advantage.
- Experience:
- 5-8 years in payments, working with a PSP, payment gateway, merchant acquirer, card scheme, issuing bank, or payments consultancy.
- Hands-on experience in at least two areas: merchant acquiring, payment gateways, card issuing, or digital wallets, with a preference for acquiring/payment gateway experience.
- Experience in building KPI reports, dashboards, and client or segment profitability analysis.
- Familiarity with pricing models and supporting sales through client propositions.
- Experience in UAE or GCC payments, particularly with government payment platforms, is a strong advantage.
- Technical and Payments Knowledge:
- Understanding of end-to-end card and wallet transaction flows: authorization, clearing, settlement, chargebacks, and reconciliation.
- Knowledge of the economics of acceptance and issuing: interchange, scheme fees, MDR, acquirer costs, and partner revenue share is advantageous.
- Familiarity with local and alternative payment methods: Apple Pay, Google Pay, BNPL, direct debit, Aani, and bank transfers.
- Knowledge of merchant and wallet lifecycle metrics: activation, inactivity, and churn.
- Proficiency in SQL and BI tools such as Power BI or Tableau, sufficient to define requirements, verify data, and create simple visualizations; advanced Excel modeling skills.
- Skills:
- Strong analytical and modeling skills, capable of converting complex data into clear recommendations.
- High attention to detail, ensuring that reports are accurate and timely.
- Clear writing and presentation skills; adept at transforming data into management reports and client-ready materials.
- Commercial judgment, with an understanding of when a deal is financially viable.
- Ability to work collaboratively across Sales, Product, Finance, Operations, and IT while managing multiple requests.
- Excellent communication skills.
