Payments Director

Overview

As Payments Director at Starling, you will own and govern the bank’s payments ecosystem, balancing rapid innovation with safety and regulatory compliance. You’ll lead a high‑performing team across technology, risk and operations to manage payment risks, supplier relationships and incidents, ensuring resilience as the bank scales. You’ll shape governance, collaborate with schemes and external partners, and drive a robust control framework. This is a strategic, visible role at the heart of our payments capability.

Pay / Benefits

• 33 days holiday
• Birthday holiday
• Pension scheme
• Private Medical Insurance
• Life insurance 4x salary
• Volunteer time (16 hours/year)

Responsibilities

• Oversee payment risk and control across the payments estate, maintaining a strong control environment
• Ensure regulatory and scheme compliance with payments obligations, standards and rules
• Own relationships with payment schemes and networks (e.g., Mastercard) and manage changes, issues and risks
• Provide governance over critical payment suppliers and third parties, including performance and escalation
• Lead incident management for payment events with root‑cause analysis and remediation
• Ensure operational resilience with contingency planning, testing and interdependencies oversight
• Assess risk and control implications of changes to payment products, platforms, regulation, schemes and suppliers
• Deliver clear reporting on payment risks, incidents, supplier performance, compliance and emerging issues to senior management
• Lead and develop a high‑performing payments team and foster cross‑functional collaboration across Technology and the wider bank

Key requirements

• Significant leadership experience in payments within bank, fintech, payments provider or similar regulated environment
• Deep knowledge of payment services, schemes and regulatory requirements
• Strong experience in payments risk management, controls and governance
• Experience managing relationships with card schemes, payment networks, processors and key third parties
• Understanding of technology and operational risk in a regulated setting
• Experience leading response to major payment or technology incidents and remediation
• Knowledge of operational resilience and management of critical services and dependencies
• Strong stakeholder management with credibility to influence senior leaders, suppliers and schemes
• Ability to challenge constructively while staying pragmatic and commercially aware
• Proven track record of leading and developing teams in fast‑moving environments

• Stakeholder management
• Constructive challenge
• Commercial awareness
• Payments risk management
• Regulatory and scheme compliance
• Relationship management with card schemes and networks

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