Head of Payments Performance & Optimisation

Role summary

This role is responsible for making sure customers can pay successfully and that the business is not losing revenue through avoidable payment failures. This role will identify issues, bring the right teams together and ensure that changes are implemented and measured.

Role purpose

Will be responsible for ensuring that all payment methods, payment providers and checkout journeys operate to an optimal standard across the business.

The role will monitor payment acceptance, identify performance issues and opportunities, and work with payment service providers, acquiring banks, technology teams, product teams and commercial stakeholders to improve successful payment completion and reduce avoidable customer friction.

The successful candidate will take ownership of payment-performance reporting, incident escalation and optimisation activity, ensuring that issues are identified quickly, investigated thoroughly and converted into measurable improvements in revenue and customer experience.

Key responsibilities

Payment performance monitoring

• Monitor payment performance across cards, digital wallets, PayPal, BNPL and other alternative payment methods. 
• Track authorisation, acceptance and completion rates by brand, market, payment method, provider, issuer, device and customer journey. 
• Identify deterioration, unusual trends and performance gaps requiring investigation. 
• Develop appropriate alerts and thresholds so material payment issues are identified quickly. 
• Maintain regular reporting that clearly explains performance, causes of movement and actions being taken. 

Performance investigation and optimisation

• Investigate payment failures and determine whether the cause sits with the PSP, acquirer, issuer, internal technology, checkout journey, fraud controls or customer behaviour. 
• Analyse decline codes, authentication outcomes, technical failures, retries and abandonment points. 
• Recommend changes to improve acceptance while maintaining appropriate fraud and risk controls. 
• Measure the impact of changes and demonstrate the resulting revenue, acceptance or customer-experience benefit. 
• Maintain a prioritised payment-optimisation roadmap. 

PSP and partner management

• Act as the operational performance contact for PSPs, acquirers and payment-method partners. 
• Challenge providers where performance falls below expectations and ensure issues are investigated and resolved. 
• Hold regular performance reviews with partners and track agreed actions through to completion. 
• Compare provider performance across markets, payment methods and transaction types. 
• Support commercial discussions by providing performance evidence and identifying service or contractual shortcomings. 

Internal stakeholder management

• Work closely with Technology, Product, Finance, Fraud, Treasury, Customer Experience and Commercial teams. 
• Translate complex payment issues into clear business language and explain the revenue and customer impact. 
• Coordinate internal investigations and ensure actions have clear owners and deadlines. 
• Support new payment-method launches, PSP migrations and checkout changes from a performance perspective. 
• Ensure payment-performance requirements are considered during product and technical design. 

Reporting and governance

• Produce weekly and monthly payment-performance reporting for senior stakeholders. 
• Provide clear commentary on what changed, why it changed and what action is required. 
• Track incidents, root causes, corrective actions and realised benefits. 
• Maintain appropriate documentation for payment journeys, providers, escalation routes and performance expectations. 

Key measures of success

• Overall payment acceptance and completion rate. 
• Card authorisation rate. 
• Payment-method performance by provider, brand and market. 
• Reduction in avoidable technical and processing failures. 
• Revenue recovered or protected through optimisation activity. 
• Speed of identification and resolution of payment incidents. 
• Delivery of PSP and internal corrective actions. 
• Performance of retries and recovery journeys. 
• Customer payment abandonment and failure rates. 
• Accuracy and usefulness of payment-performance reporting. 

Skills and experience

Essential

• Experience working in payments, ecommerce, financial services or a related environment. 
• Strong understanding of online payment journeys and payment service providers. 
• Experience analysing payment acceptance, authorisation or transaction-performance data. 
• Strong analytical skills with the ability to identify trends, root causes and commercial opportunities. 
• Experience working with PSPs, acquirers or other external payment partners. 
• Ability to coordinate technical and non-technical stakeholders. 
• Strong communication skills and the ability to explain complex issues clearly. 
• Commercial awareness and an understanding of how payment performance affects revenue and customer experience. 
• Strong organisational skills with the ability to manage multiple investigations and actions. 

Desirable

• Knowledge of card schemes, issuers, acquirers and payment-processing flows. 
• Understanding of 3DS, SCA, exemptions, tokenisation, network tokens and account updater services. 
• Experience with digital wallets, PayPal, BNPL and alternative payment methods. 
• Knowledge of payment decline codes and issuer behaviour. 
• Experience using SQL, BI tools or payment analytics platforms. 
• Understanding of fraud controls and the relationship between acceptance and fraud risk. 
• Experience supporting PSP migrations, payment orchestration or new payment-method launches. 
• Experience in a high-volume international ecommerce environment. 

Personal attributes

• Data-led and commercially focused. 
• Proactive and comfortable challenging internal teams and external providers. 
• Naturally curious and willing to investigate issues in detail. 
• Able to remain calm and structured during payment incidents. 
• Strong ownership mentality with a focus on delivering measurable outcomes. 
• Comfortable operating across technical, operational and commercial teams.