Payment Systems Business Analyst / Product Owner
Location: Lincolnshire, IL |
We are seeking an experienced Payment Systems Business Analyst / Product Owner to lead the requirements gathering, implementation, and ongoing management of our payment processor and gateway solutions. This role bridges business stakeholders, technology teams, and third-party payment vendors to deliver seamless, secure, and scalable payment experiences. The ideal candidate combines deep payments domain expertise with strong analytical and product ownership skills.
Key Responsibilities
Requirements Gathering & Analysis
- Serve as the primary point of contact for eliciting, documenting, and validating business and technical requirements for new payment processor and gateway implementations.
- Conduct stakeholder interviews, workshops, and process-mapping sessions with finance, operations, engineering, compliance, and customer experience teams.
- Translate complex business needs into clear, actionable user stories, use cases, process flows, and functional specifications.
- Define and document end-to-end payment flows including authorization, capture, settlement, refunds, chargebacks, and reconciliation.
- Identify and document integration requirements across internal systems and external payment vendors.
Product Ownership
- Own and maintain the payment systems product backlog; prioritize features and enhancements in alignment with business goals, compliance requirements, and technical feasibility.
- Author and refine user stories with detailed acceptance criteria; partner with development teams through sprint planning, grooming, and retrospectives.
- Serve as the primary decision-maker for scope, trade-offs, and prioritization within the payments product domain.
- Define and track key success metrics (authorization rates, decline rates, processing costs, uptime, transaction throughput) and drive continuous improvement.
Payment Processor & Gateway Implementation
- Lead discovery and evaluation of payment processors, gateways, and Payment Service Providers (PSPs) (e.g., Stripe, Adyen, Braintree, Worldpay, Chase Paymentech); support RFP/RFI processes and vendor selection.
- Manage end-to-end implementation lifecycle: scoping, vendor onboarding, integration design, UAT, go-live readiness, and post-launch stabilization.
- Collaborate with engineering and QA teams to define integration specifications (REST APIs, webhooks, tokenization, 3DS2, etc.) and validate implementations.
- Coordinate with payment networks (Visa, Mastercard, etc.) and acquiring banks as needed during certifications and compliance reviews.
Ongoing Maintenance & Optimization
- Monitor payment platform performance and proactively identify issues, degradations, or optimization opportunities.
- Manage change requests, platform upgrades, and new feature rollouts in partnership with vendors and internal teams.
- Conduct regular vendor reviews and performance benchmarking; escalate issues and drive resolution SLAs.
- Support A/B testing and optimization initiatives to improve authorization rates, reduce friction, and lower processing costs.
Operational Insights & Enhancements
- Define and own operational reporting frameworks that provide visibility into payment health across all channels and vendors including authorization rates, decline reasons, chargebacks, settlement timing, and processing costs.
- Partner with data and analytics teams to build dashboards and operational scorecards that surface actionable insights for finance, operations, and technology leadership.
- Conduct regular deep-dive analyses on payment trends, failure patterns, and vendor performance to identify root causes and drive continuous improvement initiatives.
- Translate operational data into concrete product and process enhancements such as intelligent retry logic, decline recovery flows, dynamic routing rules, and fee optimization strategies.
- Lead post-incident reviews for payment outages or degradations; document findings and drive systemic improvements to prevent recurrence.
- Benchmark payment operations against industry standards and competitive best practices; develop business cases for enhancements with measurable ROI.
- Collaborate with finance and accounting teams to streamline reconciliation, reduce exceptions, and improve end-of-day settlement accuracy across multi-vendor environments.
- Champion a culture of operational excellence by establishing feedback loops between front-line operations teams and the product roadmap.
Compliance & Risk
- Ensure all payment solutions adhere to PCI-DSS, PSD2, GDPR, and other applicable regulatory and security standards.
- Partner with legal, compliance, and security teams to assess risk, implement controls, and maintain audit-ready documentation.
- Stay current on evolving payment regulations, network mandates, and industry trends (real-time payments, BNPL, digital wallets, open banking).
Stakeholder Communication
- Produce clear status reports, roadmaps, and executive summaries for senior leadership and business stakeholders.
- Act as the subject matter expert (SME) on payment systems across the organization, fielding questions and providing guidance to cross-functional teams.
Required Qualifications
- 8 10+ years of experience as a Business Analyst, Product Owner, or Product Manager with a focus on payment systems, fintech, or financial services.
- Demonstrated experience leading at least one full-cycle payment processor or payment gateway implementation.
- Proven hands-on experience with retail point-of-sale (POS) payment systems, including in-store terminal integrations, card-present transactions, EMV/chip, contactless (NFC), and POS middleware platforms.
- Multi-channel payments expertise spanning in-store POS, e-commerce, mobile, kiosk, and call center with the ability to design and document unified commerce payment flows across all channels.
- Mobile POS (mPOS) experience with solutions such as tablet-based POS, mobile card readers, and associate-facing mobile checkout tools used in retail and field service environments.
- Mobile payments knowledge including in-app payments, mobile web checkout, push provisioning, and mobile-first payment UX design considerations.
- Digital wallet expertise across consumer wallets (Apple Pay, Google Pay, Samsung Pay) and merchant/closed-loop wallets; understanding of tokenization, device account numbers (DANs), and wallet provisioning flows.
- Payment widgets experience requirements gathering and oversight for embeddable, hosted, or iFrame-based payment UI components designed to streamline checkout while maintaining PCI scope reduction.
- Payment abstraction layer / API development experience defining requirements for and collaborating on the design of internal payment abstraction APIs that decouple business applications from underlying processor and gateway implementations, enabling vendor flexibility, failover routing, and centralized payment orchestration.
- Multi-vendor payment environment experience managing concurrent relationships with multiple processors, gateways, acquirers, and PSPs; understanding routing logic, failover strategies, and vendor-specific capabilities.
- Strong understanding of payment industry concepts: card-present/card-not-present, ACH, tokenization, 3DS, chargeback flows, settlement, and reconciliation.
- Hands-on experience with Agile/Scrum methodologies; proficiency with tools such as Jira, Confluence, or Azure DevOps.
- Experience with payment gateway/processor APIs (REST, JSON, ISO 8583 or similar) and the ability to work effectively with technical teams on integration design.
- Solid understanding of PCI-DSS compliance requirements and data security best practices.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills with the ability to clearly explain technical concepts to non-technical audiences.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with multiple payment platforms (e.g., Stripe, Adyen, Braintree, Worldpay, Square, PayPal).
- Experience with Text-to-Pay solutions, including SMS-based payment initiation, payment link generation, carrier billing integrations, and the end-to-end customer payment journey from text message to transaction completion.
- Familiarity with alternative payment methods (digital wallets, BNPL, real-time payments, open banking).
- CBAP, PMI-PBA, CSPO, or equivalent certification.
- Experience in a regulated industry (banking, insurance, healthcare payments, or e-commerce at scale).
- SQL proficiency for data analysis and reconciliation validation.
- Experience supporting global or multi-currency payment implementations.
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