About the Role
We're building a card-acquiring platform from scratch — and there's a critical layer that sits between engineering and finance that nobody owns yet: how the product actually moves money.
That means merchant and BIN onboarding, scheme processing, settlement and reconciliation, fiat payouts via SEPA and SWIFT, and making sure all of it is safeguarding-compliant. Right now this layer lives across our CTO and CFO. You'll own it — end to end.
No legacy systems. No bureaucracy. No ticket conveyor belt. Just you, a small senior team, and a genuinely hard domain where the decisions you make in the first six months will shape how money flows through the platform for years.
This is not a CFO role — we don't expect P&L, capital adequacy, or FP&A. It's not a Scrum PO or a BA. It's the owner of the financial and payments product layer: someone who digs into the domain themselves, writes specs engineers can build from, and makes product decisions. Disputes/chargebacks, FX, and the merchant-facing portal sit in adjacent roles.
What You'll Own — First 6 Months
Merchant & BIN Boarding. Figure out exactly how merchants and BIN ranges get set up in our core processing platform — what needs to be configured, how our system talks to it, and what the boarding flow actually looks like end to end. You're not documenting an existing process; you're designing it.
Scheme Processing.Get deep into how our scheme processing works — authorisation, 3DS/frictionless flows, clearing, settlement — and own the product decisions that come out of it. Engineering needs specs they can build from, and you're the one writing them
Settlement & Reconciliation. Design how money actually settles: from scheme settlement into our ledger, through to safeguarding accounts. Work with the CFO to make sure it's financially sound, then spec it to the point where engineering can pick it up and build.
Fiat Payout Rails. Own the product side of how we move funds out — SEPA, SWIFT, through our banking partners. Work out what we need from each banking integration and make sure those requirements are clear before anyone writes a line of code.
Safeguarding-Aware Money Flows. We're a regulated EMI — safeguarding isn't an afterthought. Make sure every money movement decision you make is designed with safeguarding requirements in mind, in close collaboration with the CFO.
You'll Be a Strong Fit If
You have 4–6+ years of product experience in payments, acquiring, or fintech — preferably in a regulated environment.
You understand card-acquiring mechanics: BIN sponsorship, scheme settlement, interchange and scheme fees, 3DS / PSD2 exemptions.
You can translate regulatory and financial requirements into product and system specs that engineers can build from.
You're comfortable at the intersection of product, engineering, and finance — and can lead alignment with CTO and CFO yourself.
You understand money movement: reconciliation, settlement, correspondent banking, SEPA/SWIFT.
You're autonomous in discovery: you read vendor documentation yourself, extract knowledge from counterparties directly, and don't wait for a pre-packaged brief.
You think in systems: you see the end-to-end flow of funds, not a collection of disconnected features.
