Payment Systems Business Analyst / Product Owner

Seeking an experienced Payment Systems Business Analyst / Product Owner to lead payment processor and gateway initiatives, gather and manage requirements, drive product ownership, and collaborate across business and technology teams to deliver secure, scalable, and seamless payment solutions. The ideal candidate will have deep expertise in payments, retail POS systems, payment gateway implementations, and stakeholder management.

Payment Systems Business Analyst / Product Owner

Location: Lincolnshire, IL (Local candidates only)
Employment Type: Contract-to-Hire
Visa Status: No sponsorship candidates (client intends to convert to FTE)

Key Responsibilities

• Lead requirements gathering, stakeholder workshops, and process mapping activities.
• Translate business requirements into user stories, functional specifications, and process flows.
• Own and prioritize the payments product backlog.
• Drive end-to-end payment processor and gateway implementations.
• Partner with engineering teams on API integrations, tokenization, 3DS, webhooks, and payment workflows.
• Define and monitor payment KPIs such as authorization rates, processing costs, transaction throughput, and uptime.
• Manage payment platform enhancements, vendor relationships, and operational reporting.
• Ensure PCI-DSS compliance and adherence to payment industry standards.
• Act as the SME for payment systems across the organization.

Required Skills

• 8+ years as Business Analyst, Product Owner, or Product Manager within Payments, FinTech, or Financial Services.
• Full lifecycle payment processor/gateway implementation experience.
• Strong retail POS payments experience:
• Card-present transactions
• EMV/Chip
• NFC/Contactless payments
• POS middleware platforms
• Multi-channel payment expertise:
• In-store POS
• E-commerce
• Mobile
• Kiosk
• Call Center
• Mobile POS (mPOS) experience.
• Digital wallets:
• Apple Pay
• Google Pay
• Samsung Pay
• Payment abstraction layer/API experience.
• Multi-vendor payment ecosystem experience.
• Strong understanding of:
• Tokenization
• 3DS
• ACH
• Chargebacks
• Settlement
• Reconciliation
• Agile/Scrum experience.
• Jira, Confluence, Azure DevOps.
• REST APIs, JSON, ISO 8583.
• PCI-DSS knowledge.
• Excellent stakeholder communication and executive-facing skills.

Preferred Skills

• Stripe, Adyen, Braintree, Worldpay, Square, PayPal.
• Text-to-Pay solutions.
• BNPL, Open Banking, Real-Time Payments.
• CBAP, PMI-PBA, CSPO certifications.
• SQL.
• Global or multi-currency payment implementations.

V/r