Title: Product Owner with Merchant Reconciliation
Location: Farmers Branch, TX (Dallas)
Our challenge
We're hiring a Product Owner to own the reconciliation platform for the merchant acquiring business. Ideal candidate will make sure every card transaction, fee, chargeback, and adjustment ties out across the card networks, the bank's general ledger, and the funds paid to merchants.
The role needs someone who already knows the merchant side of payments: how a transaction moves from authorization to merchant funding, how interchange and merchant fees are calculated, and how chargebacks and adjustments post to a merchant's account. Candidate will work with finance, settlement operations, merchant servicing, and engineering, and turn reconciliation problems into stories the teams can build.
The Role
Responsibilities:
- Own the product backlog for merchant reconciliation: transaction, settlement, funding, fee, and chargeback reconciliation.
- Define matching rules across authorization and clearing records, network settlement reports (Visa VSS, Mastercard settlement), bank settlement accounts, the general ledger, and merchant funding files.
- Specify how breaks are detected, categorized, aged, routed, and resolved, including match tolerances, auto-match targets, and the manual workflow for operations analysts.
- Own requirements for interchange and scheme fee reconciliation: comparing fees billed by the networks with fees charged to merchants, and flagging transactions that downgraded or misqualified.
- Define reconciliation of chargebacks, representments, reversals, and merchant adjustments against the merchant ledger and reserve balances.
- Own requirements for ingesting, validating, and processing settlement, funding, and reconciliation files from networks, processors, and partner banks.
- Work with finance on general ledger mapping, month-end close, suspense and clearing account balances, and SOX controls.
- Specify reports and dashboards for match rates, open breaks by age and value, unreconciled funds, and month-end status.
- Act as the merchant acquiring subject matter expert for engineering teams: authorization, clearing, settlement, interchange, merchant pricing, and funding timelines (same-day, T+1, T+2).
- Make sure merchant statements tie to merchant deposits, and work with servicing teams on reconciliation-related merchant inquiries.
- Review the reconciliation impact of card network mandates and new products (new payment methods, faster funding, new pricing plans) before they go live.
- Work as the Product Owner on an Agile Release Train under the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe): write and split features into stories, run backlog refinement, and take part in PI Planning, system demos, and Inspect and Adapt.
- Work with the Product Manager and other POs on the train to manage cross-team dependencies.
- Run sprint planning and sprint reviews, and accept or reject completed stories against their acceptance criteria.
- Give stakeholders in finance, settlement operations, merchant servicing, risk, and audit a regular update on scope, dates, and trade-offs, and flag slips early with options attached.
- Explain reconciliation logic and system behavior in plain language to finance users, and finance requirements in technical terms to engineers.
- Lead requirement workshops and UAT sessions, and support production releases, including defect triage after go-live.
Requirements:
- 7+ years in merchant acquiring or payment processing, with at least 3 years as a Product Owner or Business Analyst on reconciliation, settlement, or finance systems.
- Strong merchant domain knowledge: the transaction lifecycle from authorization to merchant funding, interchange and merchant pricing, chargebacks, and merchant adjustments.
- Hands-on reconciliation experience: matching rules, break management, general ledger postings, and settlement and funding files.
- Working knowledge of Visa and Mastercard clearing and settlement reports.
- 2+ years working in a Scaled Agile (SAFe) environment, including PI Planning and managing dependencies across teams on an Agile Release Train.
- Experience writing features, user stories, and acceptance criteria in Jira (or a similar tool).
- Able to query transaction and ledger data in SQL to investigate breaks.
- Clear written and spoken communication, with a record of working across finance, operations, and technology teams and presenting to senior stakeholders.
- Bachelor's degree in finance, accounting, business, computer science, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
Preferred Skills:
- Certifications in product management, payments, or related fields.
- Knowledge of financial regulations, compliance standards, and industry best practices.
- Experience working in fast-paced, agile environments.
We offer:
- A highly competitive compensation and benefits package.
- A multinational organization with 58 offices in 21 countries and the possibility to work abroad.
- 10 days of paid annual leave (plus sick leave and national holidays).
- Maternity & paternity leave plans.
- A comprehensive insurance plan including medical, dental, vision, life insurance, and long-/short-term disability (plans vary by region).
- Retirement savings plans.
- A higher education certification policy.
- Commuter benefits (varies by region).
- Extensive training opportunities, focused on skills, substantive knowledge, and personal development.
- On-demand Udemy for Business for all Synechron employees with free access to more than 5000 curated courses.
- Coaching opportunities with experienced colleagues from our Financial Innovation Labs (FinLabs) and Center of Excellences (CoE) groups.
- Cutting edge projects at the world’s leading tier-one banks, financial institutions and insurance firms.
- A flat and approachable organization.
- A truly diverse, fun-loving, and global work culture.
SYNECHRON’S DIVERSITY & INCLUSION STATEMENT
Diversity & Inclusion are fundamental to our culture, and Synechron is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. Our Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiative ‘Same Difference’ is committed to fostering an inclusive culture – promoting equality, diversity and an environment that is respectful to all. We strongly believe that a diverse workforce helps build stronger, successful businesses as a global company. We encourage applicants from across diverse backgrounds, race, ethnicities, religion, age, marital status, gender, sexual orientations, or disabilities to apply. We empower our global workforce by offering flexible workplace arrangements, mentoring, internal mobility, learning and development programs, and more.
All employment decisions at Synechron are based on business needs, job requirements and individual qualifications, without regard to the applicant’s gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, disabled or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.
