Overview
The AVP Senior Payments Operations Specialist will work directly with the VP Payments Operations Manager and Director of Operations on processes and projects that impact Payments throughout the Bank (ACH, Wires and Real Time/Instant Payments). This role will require cross functional collaboration between the bank’s Payment Groups, Information Technology, Financial Crimes Risk Management, other Operational teams, and the various support groups (PMO, Compliance, Audit). It will be critical for this role to gain a full end-to-end understanding of the Payment Systems to assist with resolving production issues, identify and implement increased controls, determine efficiency opportunities, and support new business development. This role will lead Compliance, Audits and OCC support for all of Payments Operations. This role will be responsible for supporting the Payments group during the sales cycle to present functionality that currently exists and work with internal stakeholders to determine feasibility of requested customer changes. The individual will also support the testing and onboarding of new clients working with LOB’s during the required annual monitoring and due diligence. The individual will be responsible for identifying trends in the market and present to Senior Operations & Payments Leadership the ability to support these trends or present enhancements to support new revenue opportunities.
Responsibilities
Essential Functions
Represents Payments Operations with important functional stakeholders, including Payments, IT, FCRM and VMO to provide operational solutions to strategic business needs. Identifies trends in the marketplace and works across senior leadership in the Payments space to demonstrate operational capabilities to meet client demands or future opportunities.
Leads project work between internal clients, vendors, and IT to resolve system and other technical issues affecting processing for payment types. Determines scope of problem, including identifying all clients who may be impacted by the issue, estimates time to resolve issue, contacts internal clients and provides status updates, and determines the need to switch to alternate or contingency processing workflow/platforms to meet processing deadlines. Alerts leadership to major issues and recommendations.
Provides strategic analysis, recommendation and help influence key decisions by senior leadership regarding the Payments systems utilized by the Bank and leads efforts to identify requirements, fully tests and implements system changes.
Identifies marketplace trends and works across senior Payments leadership to demonstrate operational capabilities to meet client demands or future opportunities.
Establishes monitoring of payment transaction and administration activities to detect issues and responds to problems quickly. Approves payment transactions requiring management approval levels.
Services client needs, including presenting Payments support solutions and showcasing capabilities to enhance client experience. Leads clients during onboarding process to ensure proper integration, testing, documentation and adherence to rules and regulations.
Assists Legal team with maintaining client Payments agreement templates and assists business team with selecting and enhancing the correct agreement addendums during the contracting process.
Drives, ensures, and assists with the designing and monitoring of disaster recovery and business continuity plans and Payments Operations procedures. Establishes monitoring parameters to provide an early warning of issues and/or problems with file transfer and vendor processes. Establishes escalation paths to insure notification of and resolution of issues.
Leads the change management process for payment systems projects, conversions, and implementations. Works with VP Payments Operations Manager, Payments teams and vendors to ensure future product releases cover changes in business needs and ensure testing, and quality assurance are performed per department policies and procedures, documentation is updated, department staff trained on new procedures or processes and system changes or client go-live events are communicated timely to all effected bank teams.
Analyzes and monitors ongoing opportunities to maximize operational and systemic efficiencies and to reinforce core system and procedural redundancies. Presents recommendations to leadership.
Participates in third party fin-tech providers RFPs to ensure all solutions will integrate smoothly with existing platforms and processes and to ensure that solutions can be supported by Payments Operations.
Partners with the systems development teams to build additional functionality, notifications, and other application and platform modifications as needed.
Maintains awareness of regula