Business Development Lead

ABOUT POINT.ME point.me helps people get extraordinary value from their loyalty points. Gateway, our white-label redemption platform, lets banks, fintechs, and card issuers embed a complete travel-redemption experience (search, compare, transfer, and book across 250+ loyalty programs) inside their own app, under their own brand. An estimated $20B in points goes unredeemed every year. We are changing that. THE ROLE We are hiring our founding Business Development Lead for Financial Institutions: the first dedicated seller carrying Gateway demand. You will own the FI pipeline end to end and build the sales motion from scratch. There is no SDR team, no inbound engine, and no established brand to lean on. There is a real product, live partners, and a large untapped market. WHAT YOU WILL DO Roughly in priority order. The work below is real, but selling is the core of it: your first three jobs are to source, advance, and close FI deals. Your fourth job is operational and strategic support. Your fifth job is product and customer insights. Drive business development Prospect, qualify, pitch, negotiate, and close partnerships with banks, fintechs, and card issuers, self-sourcing the majority of your pipeline through outbound, your network, events, and creative wedges. Identify, evaluate, and close anchor partners. Structure partnerships that align incentives and scale. Turn early deals into durable, repeatable GTM motions. Stand up the operating model Build the sales motion from scratch: ICP, target account list, outbound playbook, pitch narratives, pricing, and CRM discipline. Lead pilots, learn fast, and formalize what works. Eliminate manual work and one-off processes as early as possible, and run your pipeline with analytical rigor: honest forecasting, stage discipline, and clear weekly reads to leadership. Scale through systems and AI Partner with Product, Data, and Engineering to automate workflows and integrations. Use AI to scale judgment, consistency, and throughput across your pipeline. Translate real-world execution into productized, platform-level capabilities. Be the connector Serve as the connective tissue between external partners and internal teams, multi-threading complex accounts across product, loyalty, payments, procurement, legal, infosec, and compliance, and mapping every budget center. Co-sell with ecosystem partners and coordinate with our LP-facing partnership executive so supply and demand narratives reinforce each other. Translate FI-specific needs into scalable platform features, and feed market learnings back into point.me 's core GTM and product strategy. WHO YOU ARE You were a first or very early salesperson at an early-stage company, or you launched a new vertical or product within a more established one, and personally closed complex enterprise deals. You sourced most of your own pipeline and can prove it. You built the artifacts (decks, target lists, pricing, contract structures) yourself. You have sold a nice-to-have: a product the buyer did not strictly need, where you had to create urgency and find budget. You have sold something complex that required educating the buyer. You know enterprise fundamentals cold: multi-threading, account mapping, and budget-center navigation are second nature. You are on a steep trajectory: you started earlier or smaller and earned your way up fast. You are energized, not drained, by ambiguity and the absence of structure, and you want the founding closer seat for its own sake. Nice to have: Experience selling fintech infrastructure (API, embedded finance, loyalty tech, payments) into banks. Loyalty or travel knowledge is a plus but not a substitute for early-stage selling experience. COMPENSATION Competitive base plus OTE with meaningful upside tied to partnership outcomes. Structure will evolve as we refine the model (logos signed, depth of integration, then revenue). Fully distributed, US hours. We are happy to discuss specifics early.