Senior Merchant Services Specialist

We're Hiring: Senior Merchant Services Specialist

Location: United Arab Emirates (Remote)

Employment Type: Full-Time

Experience Level: Senior

Work Arrangement: Fully Remote

About Us

We are a globally focused organization committed to delivering secure, reliable, scalable, and efficient payment solutions across diverse markets.

Our Payments, Merchant Services, Finance, Risk, Compliance, Technology, Operations, Sales, and Customer Experience teams collaborate to help businesses accept payments, manage transactions, optimize settlement, reduce payment risk, and deliver seamless experiences to their customers.

The Role

We are seeking an experienced Senior Merchant Services Specialist to lead merchant onboarding, payment acceptance operations, transaction processing, settlement, reconciliation, merchant support, risk coordination, and continuous improvement across merchant-services activities.

The ideal candidate will combine strong payments expertise with commercial awareness, operational discipline, analytical capability, and client-service skills to ensure merchants receive reliable payment services, transactions are processed accurately, operational issues are resolved efficiently, and merchant relationships remain compliant, profitable, and well supported.

Key Responsibilities

• Manage end-to-end merchant-services operations across supported payment channels and products.
• Support merchant onboarding, account setup, activation, maintenance, and ongoing servicing.
• Review merchant applications, business information, payment requirements, and supporting documentation.
• Coordinate merchant due-diligence activities with Compliance, Risk, and Financial Crime teams.
• Ensure merchant profiles, business information, settlement instructions, and authorized contacts are accurately maintained.
• Support merchant underwriting and risk-assessment processes within established policies.
• Coordinate merchant account approvals, activation requirements, transaction limits, and operating parameters.
• Support merchant acceptance of card, account-to-account, digital-wallet, online, mobile, and other applicable payment methods.
• Manage merchant payment-processing activities across relevant channels.
• Monitor transaction volumes, authorization rates, declines, settlements, refunds, chargebacks, and payment exceptions.
• Investigate transaction-processing issues and coordinate timely resolution.
• Monitor merchant transaction flows for unusual activity, processing anomalies, and operational risks.
• Support payment acceptance optimization by analyzing authorization performance, decline patterns, and transaction behavior.
• Work with payment processors, acquiring banks, card networks, gateways, and technology partners to resolve operational issues.
• Maintain strong working relationships with merchants, payment partners, banks, processors, and internal stakeholders.
• Coordinate merchant account configuration and payment-product setup.
• Support integration of merchant systems with payment gateways, APIs, hosted payment pages, terminals, and other payment infrastructure.
• Participate in merchant testing, user acceptance testing, certification, and production readiness activities.
• Validate payment flows, transaction messages, settlement files, refund processes, and reconciliation outputs.
• Support merchant implementation projects from requirements gathering through launch and stabilization.
• Coordinate with Technology and Product teams on merchant-platform enhancements and payment integrations.
• Monitor merchant settlement activity and ensure funds are processed according to agreed schedules.
• Manage settlement exceptions, delayed settlements, rejected transactions, and account discrepancies.
• Perform merchant settlement and transaction reconciliations between payment platforms, acquiring systems, bank accounts, and accounting records.
• Investigate settlement discrepancies, missing transactions, fee differences, and reconciliation breaks.
• Ensure merchant statements and settlement reports are accurate and delivered within agreed timelines.
• Support merchant funding, reserve, hold, and settlement arrangements in accordance with approved requirements.
• Coordinate with Finance and Treasury on settlement funding, liquidity, bank balances, and payment flows.
• Review merchant fees, commissions, transaction charges, interchange-related costs, and other payment economics.
• Support merchant pricing analysis and fee-structure reviews within approved commercial frameworks.
• Analyze merchant profitability and transaction economics.
• Identify opportunities to improve merchant revenue, retention, payment volumes, and service utilization.
• Support Sales and Relationship Management teams with merchant proposals, pricing analysis, product information, and client discussions.
• Identify opportunities to expand merchant adoption of additional payment products and services.
• Analyze merchant transaction trends, product usage, payment-method adoption, and account performance.
• Monitor merchant performance against agreed service levels and commercial expectations.
• Manage merchant service requests, operational inquiries, and escalations.
• Investigate merchant complaints relating to transactions, settlements, fees, refunds, payment acceptance, and account servicing.
• Coordinate resolution of merchant issues with internal teams and external payment partners.
• Monitor chargebacks, disputes, retrieval requests, representments, and related merchant processes.
• Coordinate with Disputes, Risk, and Operations teams on chargeback-related issues and merchant support.
• Support fraud-prevention activities and monitor potentially suspicious merchant or transaction behavior.
• Escalate unusual transaction patterns, merchant activity, or operational incidents in accordance with established procedures.
• Coordinate with Compliance and Financial Crime teams on KYC, sanctions screening, transaction monitoring, merchant reviews, and regulatory requirements.
• Ensure merchant services comply with applicable laws, payment-network requirements, internal policies, and contractual obligations.

Key Performance Indicators

• Merchant onboarding turnaround time
• Merchant activation rate
• Merchant onboarding accuracy
• Merchant due-diligence completion
• Merchant account setup accuracy
• Transaction processing accuracy
• Transaction approval rate
• Payment authorization rate
• Payment decline rate
• Transaction success rate
• Payment-processing turnaround time
• Settlement success rate
• Settlement timeliness
• Settlement exception rate
• Settlement reconciliation accuracy
• Outstanding reconciliation items
• Merchant statement accuracy
• Refund processing turnaround time
• Refund accuracy
• Chargeback rate
• Chargeback resolution time
• Dispute resolution rate
• Retrieval request response time
• Fraud-related merchant incidents
• Merchant risk-review completion
• KYC compliance
• Sanctions-screening compliance
• Merchant transaction-monitoring effectiveness
• Merchant policy compliance
• Payment-network compliance
• Merchant service-level compliance
• Merchant support response time
• Merchant issue resolution time
• Merchant complaint rate
• Merchant satisfaction
• Merchant retention rate
• Merchant transaction-volume growth
• Payment-method adoption
• Merchant product penetration
• Merchant revenue contribution
• Merchant profitability
• Transaction fee revenue
• Payment-processing cost efficiency
• Acquiring and processor cost efficiency
• Payment gateway availability
• Merchant platform uptime
• System integration success rate
• Automation adoption
• Operational incident recurrence
• Audit issue resolution
• Process improvement completion
• Management reporting timeliness

Ideal Candidate

The successful candidate should have strong experience in merchant services, acquiring, payment processing, card services, payments operations, fintech, transaction banking, or financial-services operations, preferably within a bank, payment institution, acquiring organization, fintech, payment processor, or multinational financial-services environment.

The candidate should demonstrate:

• Strong understanding of merchant acquiring and payment-acceptance processes.
• Proven experience managing merchant onboarding, servicing, transaction processing, and settlement.
• Strong knowledge of card payments, payment gateways, digital payments, and merchant-processing environments.
• Experience working with acquiring banks, payment processors, payment networks, gateways, and technology providers.
• Strong understanding of transaction authorization, declines, refunds, settlements, chargebacks, and disputes.
• Experience performing merchant settlement and transaction reconciliations.
• Strong understanding of merchant pricing, transaction fees, payment economics, and profitability.
• Experience supporting merchant risk assessment and ongoing merchant reviews.
• Familiarity with KYC, sanctions screening, transaction monitoring, fraud prevention, and financial-crime controls.