Head of Visa Consulting and Analytics

Job Description

Company Description

Visa is a world leader in digital payments, facilitating more than 215 billion payments transactions between consumers, merchants, financial institutions and government entities across more than 200 countries and territories each year. Our mission is to connect the world through the most innovative, convenient, reliable and secure payments network, enabling individuals, businesses and economies to thrive.

When you join Visa, you join a culture of purpose and belonging – where your growth is priority, your identity is embraced, and the work you do matters. We believe that economies that include everyone everywhere, uplift everyone everywhere. Your work will have a direct impact on billions of people around the world – helping unlock financial access to enable the future of money movement.
 

About VCA

Visa Consulting & Analytics (VCA) is the consulting arm of Visa. As of May 2025, the global team is composed of more than 2000 consultants worldwide, over a dozen economists, and more than 500 data scientists and engineers. VCA’s strategic goal is to uplift the performance and profitability of our clients through tangible and impactful results. With a robust team that has a combined expertise in consulting, technology, data science, payments and economic and financial intelligence, VCA offers consulting services for all types of clients. VCA's core client segments include issuers, acquirers, merchants, fintechs, payment enablers, and governments.

Job Description

VCA North America Practice Areas include various specialized advisory activities, such as: risk (credit risk, authorizations, disputes and cyber security), commercial and money movement, portfolio optimization, and financial benchmarking. 

The VP, VCA NA Practice Areas will be responsible for driving and executing the strategy for the Practice Area’s business in NA reporting to the Head of VCA NA.  This seasoned executive will have dual oversight of the P&L for this business and be held to business development, solution identification, and commercialization leading to revenue with appropriate expense and margin targets.  The successful candidate will also be responsible for building and leading a regional team and be expected to role model the Visa Leadership Principles in doing so.  This executive will collaborate closely with the regional leaders in Client Services, Risk, Risk & Issuing Solutions, Products, Value Added Services, Intelligence & Data Solutions, as well as the Global Practices Team. 

This role reports to the Head of Advisory NA, a role which is part of Visa’s Value Added Services (VAS) organization.

Key responsibilities:

• Design, drive and execute the Practice Area strategy that enables this business to achieve accelerated growth over the next several years.
• Promote a client-first, revenue-driven mindset amongst Practice Area leaders and direct reports that fosters innovation at the client face, responds to client needs, deploys responsible data use and ensures commercial viability in the work the Practice Area team does.
• Champion (and develop) the usage of the latest AI tools and techniques in developing the next generation of consulting work for our clients that drives efficiency and impact into our client work.
• Drive the scaleable transfer of client-tested Visa data capabilities and best practices to achieve higher revenue. Create a repeatable process to identify commercially viable offerings in NA.
• Based on client inputs, develop a Practice Areas capabilities and solutions roadmap to inform and prioritize consulting, platform and technology investment requirements, that will in turn enable rapid growth (including retiring non-commercially viable offerings).
• Promote the development of common methodologies, taxonomy, frameworks, and tools globally in pursuit of faster innovation and revenue growth.
• Lead a team responsible for creating compelling client-facing offerings, collateral and other sales materials that that facilitate efficient sales motions with clients to accelerate PA revenue.
• Personally contribute to VCA business development efforts through providing thought leadership, client relationship development, and coaching of the teams.
• Evangelize the PA business internally with client-facing VCA, sales (account executive), VAS and other audiences, through town halls, newsletters and other communication avenues.
• Work with IDS to negotiate data partnerships to combine with VisaNet data to create new, innovative data services and solutions for clients, especially the use cases enabling risk, commercials and money movement.
• Serve as a liaison between NA VCA/Advisory and the Risk Team, CS Team, RaIS Team, and CMS Team.
• Hire, mentor and coach deep subject matter experts in the practice areas on both internal organizational issues, resource availability, strategic alignment questions, and career development.
• Drive effective organizational change and culture change. Do so through contributing to development and implementation of a strong collaborative work environment and the promotion of Visa’s Leadership Principles.
• Collaborate with Global PA leaders to export / import capabilities, technology and advisory expertise

Qualifications

Strategic and Functional Excellence

The successful candidate should bring a set of key experiences, skills, and perspectives:

• A proven growth, P&L and management track record
• Deep Generative AI expertise and capabilities and a proven data-based consulting skill set
• Proven capabilities delivering complex specialization supporting generalists in consulting projects
• Strong experience building multi-year commercial relationships in consulting organizations
• Ability to quickly comprehend changes in the rapidly evolving business and regulatory landscape
• A professional capacity for strong enthusiasm and accountability, even in the face of transformative change that can create ambiguity and uncertainty for people
• High attention to detail and quality in both client project delivery and administrative activities
• Highly adaptive, comfortable working within a complex, and often ambiguous, environment.
• Proven exceptional people leadership skills
• Outstanding written, verbal, and presentation communications skills appropriate for a wide, global audience. Capable of summarizing complex issues into succinct messaging
• Proactive and effective communicator. Experienced at presenting information at senior levels, facilitating group discussions and debate with the ability to influence across geographic and functional lines (whether virtual or in-person)
• Strong business acumen and understanding of Visa and Client business models

People Leadership and Stakeholder Management

The successful candidate should bring a set of key capabilities and experiences:

• Strong interpersonal and leadership skills to influence and build credibility with senior leaders across a federated organization
• Team-oriented, collaborative, diplomatic, and flexible, with proven ability to build strong working relationships with internal and external clients at all levels of management and work on complex issues within cross-functional teams
• Self-starter who can responsibly advance work and is comfortable making sound, well-informed judgement calls for progress, without needless delays
• An individual who is known for building deep and trusted relationships despite sometimes competing priorities
• Open-minded and willing to listen to ideas and opinions from others. Able to look for new solutions when current processes don't work
• Inspirational leader who can earn the trust and partnership of a highly diverse group of internal and external partners
• Ability to manage a team budget with numerous cost centers in multiple global regions and currencies

This is a hybrid position. Expectation of days in office will be confirmed by your hiring manager.

Travel Requirements: This position requires travel up to 30% of the time, given the globally distributed organization this executive will lead.

Mental/Physical Requirements: This position will be performed in an office setting.  The position will require the incumbent to sit and stand at a desk, communicate in person and by telephone, frequently operate standard office equipment, such as telephones and computers.

Visa is an EEO Employer. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability or protected veteran status.  Visa will also consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with EEOC guidelines and applicable local law.

Visa will consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with applicable local law, including the requirements of Article 49 of the San Francisco Police Code.

Qualifications

Basic Qualifications
o 12 or more years of work experience with a bachelor’s Degree or at least 10 years of experience with an Advanced degree (e.g. Masters/ MBA/JD/MD) or at least 8 years of work experience with a PhD
o Applications of AI driven tools and approaches to data science in multiple specialized areas
o Knowledge of credit risk, fraud, chargebacks and including large/complex issuer experience
o Knowledge of commercial cards and money movement strategies
o Knowledge of portfolio optimization in credit and debit card businesses

Preferred Qualifications:
o 15 or more years of experience with an Advanced Degree (e.g. Masters, MBA, JD, MD, PhD)
o 15+ years of work experience in high-profile/high-impact technical project management
o Strong knowledge of payments and related practice areas (e.g., risk, commercials, money movement)
o Advanced knowledge of Microsoft Suite of office tools
o Curious and lifelong learner who keeps up to date on emerging trends in data science and technology
o Successful track record of operating cross-functionally, ideally in a federated enterprise design
o Proven ability to work under deadlines and manage multiple projects with evolving requirements
o Team player possessing a strong drive to add value to the business direction
o Ability to influence the organization in order to make strategy happen