Northreach
Card Schemes Manager
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Northreach
Northreach is a specialist recruitment partner connecting exceptional talent with high-growth businesses across Financial Services, FinTech and Digital. We partner with ambitious organisations to help them attract exceptional talent while supporting professionals with exciting career opportunities across the payments ecosystem.
About the Company
Our client is a fast-growing FinTech operating within the payments and financial services sector. Following continued growth in transaction volumes and its merchant portfolio, the business is investing in its Payments Governance capability and is looking to appoint an experienced Card Schemes Manager to own relationships with Visa, Mastercard and other payment scheme partners.
This is a key strategic hire, offering the opportunity to shape scheme governance, ensure regulatory compliance and influence how the business scales its acquiring and payment capabilities.
The Opportunity
This is a high-impact role responsible for managing the company's relationship with the major card schemes while ensuring ongoing compliance with scheme rules and operational requirements. You'll work across Product, Fraud, Risk, Compliance, Operations and Commercial teams to ensure new initiatives, merchant onboarding and payment solutions align with Visa and Mastercard regulations. This role is ideal for someone who enjoys interpreting complex scheme rules, influencing business decisions and acting as the internal expert on all card scheme matters.
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Key Responsibilities
- Act as the company's subject matter expert for Visa, Mastercard and other payment schemes.
- Manage relationships with card scheme representatives and external payment partners.
- Interpret, communicate and implement scheme rule changes across the business.
- Ensure ongoing compliance with all card scheme operating regulations.
- Support new product launches by providing scheme guidance and approval where required.
- Review merchant portfolios to ensure scheme compliance and minimise regulatory risk.
- Partner with Fraud, Risk and Compliance teams on chargeback reduction and dispute management.
- Support merchant onboarding, high-risk merchant reviews and acquiring governance.
- Monitor card scheme bulletins, mandates and regulatory updates.
- Coordinate scheme audits, reporting requirements and remediation activities.
- Produce management information and reporting for senior leadership.
- Drive continuous improvements across scheme governance, operational processes and internal controls.
What We're Looking For
- Significant experience working within card schemes, merchant acquiring, payments or e-money.
- Strong knowledge of Visa and Mastercard operating regulations.
- Experience working within an acquiring bank, payment processor, payment gateway or EMI.
- Good understanding of chargebacks, disputes, interchange, merchant risk and acquiring operations.
- Experience interpreting and implementing card scheme rule changes.
- Strong stakeholder management skills with the ability to influence across multiple business functions.
- Excellent analytical, organisational and problem-solving abilities.
- Comfortable working within a fast-paced, scaling payments environment.
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Highly Desirable
- Experience managing relationships directly with Visa and Mastercard.
- Experience supporting high-risk merchant portfolios.
- Knowledge of payment acceptance, acquiring operations and merchant onboarding.
- Experience working within an FCA-regulated business.
- Understanding of PSD2, PCI DSS and wider payments regulation.
- Exposure to fraud prevention, financial crime controls and transaction monitoring.
Why Join?
- Become the card schemes expert within a rapidly growing FinTech.
- Play a key role in shaping payment strategy and governance.
- Work closely with executive leadership and influence business-critical decisions.
- Broad exposure across Product, Fraud, Risk, Compliance and Commercial teams.
- Opportunity to build and develop the card schemes function as the business scales.
- Competitive salary, bonus and benefits package.
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