Senior Payments Strategist, Americas

Senior Payments Strategist, Americas

San Diego, CA preferred (US remote considered) *

The Global Payments team enables consumers to pay for their digital content and services by maximizing global acceptance and minimizing friction within the purchasing experience across the entire PlayStation® ecosystem. You are a proven thought leader in the payments space, particularly in the Latam region with a focus on Brazil. You will be able to see and scope out new opportunities and collaborate effectively both internally and externally. You will be a true payments veteran with a keen sense of effective “soft sell” partner engagement to help further the payments team's goals of increased payment acceptance, cost reduction, and payments processing optimization, all while balancing chargeback risk.

The role encompasses a wide range of responsibilities, including the management of a diverse collection of payment partners, the negotiation of complex payment contracts, and collaboration with diverse global teams to identify new opportunities for innovation. This position involves presenting and assessing opportunities for KPI improvements in direct discussions with card issuing banks, card networks, and other payment partners. Your responsibilities will cover the key areas of payment optimization, touch regulatory / card scheme compliance and payment operations enhancements.

The ideal candidate will be a polished external ambassador for Payments at SIE, responsible for developing and clearly communicating the Business’ commercial strategy in the Americas. This will be accomplished by leveraging deep payments expertise to craft creative commercial proposals and maintain external relationships while fostering an environment of constant incremental improvement at scale.

Overall, we are looking for individuals that are passionate about our brand and what they do, have a high sense of integrity and excel in building strong relationships by deeply caring about others, including our customers.

Your Responsibilities

• Work closely across internal payment teams and the external payment ecosystem to identify and help define forward-looking initiatives for the Americas
• Identify tactical tweaks to help optimize internal processes for immediate gain without heavy internal lifts by internal teams
• Identify longer term projects that require heavy product and/or engineering effort and “sell” them internally in an effort to get them on the roadmap
• Help ensure regulatory, card scheme and commercial partner contractual compliance from a payments perspective
• Assist larger payment ops team when needed to identify gaps in processes and create long term foundational initiatives to solve these gaps in the long term
• Be a key leader helping craft our global payment conversion optimization strategy with an eye on maximizing acceptance without increasing fraud or costs
• Operate independently and confidently with external parties throughout payments ecosystem w/little day to day oversight
• Lead and develop emerging business partners, ensuring all agreements and products are commercially/financially viable.
• Frequent and regular domestic and international travel may be required
• Ability to work varying hours as well as a flexible approach to working hours to support global business operations.

Your Experience/Skills Essential

• 5 years+ of diverse payments experience in a digital ecommerce environment whilst delivering significant results, including experience with payments in Latam, particularly Brazil
• Bachelor's Degree or equivalent experience and Master's degree preferred
• Recognized payment industry leader with understanding of cultural and regional differences in attitudes towards different online payment systems.
• Deep network of industry relationships including processors and like minded merchants with similar priorities
• Experience in payment optimization, complex payments contracting and payment operations
• Experience navigating the payment regulatory and payment scheme landscape
• Ability to navigate successfully across complex, geographically and commercially diverse internal operations
• Ability to provide high impact and quality proposals and presentations and confidently hold meetings with senior team members
• Ability to successfully build relationships with partners and stakeholders
• Self-starter who is solution focused and able to work under their own initiative with little day-to-day oversight
• Experience of working under pressure, in an ever-changing and challenging environment

Desirable

• Experience in the video games industry
• Language skills, particularly Portuguese or Spanish
• Experience with co branded cards

**PlayStation offers a global hybrid office/remote working model — Flex Modes — which aims to combine the flexibility of remote working with the magic of in-person collaboration. The model is built upon the principle of working together in-person as work requires, with the freedom to work remotely otherwise. We will consider fully remote candidates who are able to come in for 'Moments that Matter'.