AVP Payments Product Owner

You will own the Payments product end to end for our Fund Services. As the voice of the customer, you will turn client needs, business priorities, and regulatory intent into a prioritised backlog and high-quality delivery, from concept to launch.

You will be the single point of ownership across Product, Engineering, Business Analysis, Testing, Application Support, and global Operations. This is a hands-on role in a regulated environment, balancing functional, resiliency, security, and regulatory needs, with controls and governance central to every change.

Product ownership and delivery

• Own the Payments vision, roadmap, and prioritised backlog, and write clear user stories with testable acceptance criteria.

• Run sprint planning, refinement, reviews, UAT, and business sign off, and make tradeoffs across scope, quality, timelines, and feasibility.

• Track performance and adoption post release through metrics such as payment success rates, volumes, and processing times.

• Support modernisation and simplification of legacy payment capabilities, improving resiliency and availability with the specialist team.

AI enabled payments

• Own and expand AI assisted features, building on the live AI assisted transaction review, keeping recommendations advisory and the final decision with the approver.

• Embed AI within existing approval workflows so controls hold, sensitive data is never exposed to the AI service, and AI processing stays auditable.

• Partner with Engineering, Architecture, and Compliance, using AI assisted prototyping to test ideas before committing engineering capacity.

Payment functionality and workflows

• Own the functional behaviour and user experience for payments, including approval, maker checker, and signer workflows.

• Partner with the dedicated bank integrations and formats specialists, who own rails, message formats, and connectivity, translating their input into product requirements.

Client onboarding and commercial input

• Lead payments onboarding and enhancements for existing, new, and prospective clients, including go lives and hypercare.

• Elicit explicit and implicit needs, benchmark against market and competitors, and support presales and RFP responses.

Governance, controls, and compliance

• Own role creation, role catalogue, and the role inventory for access provisioning.

• Partner with Internal Control and local IT on access remediation, including restricted access and various regulatory requirements for confidential client data.

• Ensure nonfunctional requirements, SLAs, and control obligations are captured within delivery.

Dependency, risk, and production support

• Manage cross team dependencies and delivery risks early and act as product point of contact for production issues through root cause and fix.

• Apply strong judgement on when to act, align, or escalate, particularly where client harm or regulatory risk may arise.

Team management and mentoring

• People manage junior Business Analysts, including day-to-day work, training, and career development.

• Act as the recognised subject matter expert for the Payments product and coach the team on agile practice and product thinking.

Required

• Overall 10 or more years in product ownership or business analysis, with at least three documented years as Product Owner into payments, banking, or fund services technology.

• Functional knowledge of payment flows including IAT, FX, and batch and bulk payments. Deep rails and message format expertise is not required, as a specialist team holds it.

• Proven agile backlog management, writing precise user stories, BRDs, and acceptance criteria, including for AI driven functionality.

• Experience delivering in a regulated, controls driven environment, with a grasp of RBAC, segregation of duties, client protection, and audit remediation.

• Strong stakeholder management, able to challenge, influence, and drive decisions across business, architecture, and engineering in a matrix organisation.

• Commercial acumen, data driven decisions, and clear communication across senior and client facing audiences and time zones.

• Working proficiency with agile tooling such as JIRA and Confluence, and with Excel and PowerPoint.

Preferred

• Client facing and commercially minded, comfortable running demos and shaping product direction from client problems.

• Working knowledge of Generative and Agentic AI, rapid prototyping, and AI governance, applied within proper controls.

• Experience with cross-regional payments modernisation and regulatory change, for example SEPA Instant or Verification of Payee.

• Product certification such as CSPO, PSPO, or SAFe POPM, and a bachelor’s degree in a relevant field. An MBA is a plus.

You will move from client problem to discovery, to AI assisted prototype, to validation, and then to engineering rollout, while protecting business as usual. Controls, security, testing, and governance stay central to every payments change.