Sr. Director, Product Innovation

At Early Warning, we’ve powered and protected the U.S. financial system for over thirty years with cutting-edge solutions like Zelle®, Paze℠, and so much more. As a trusted name in payments, we partner with thousands of institutions to increase access to financial services and protect transactions for hundreds of millions of consumers and small businesses.

Positions located in Scottsdale, San Francisco, Chicago, or New York follow a hybrid work model to allow for a more collaborative working environment.

Candidates responding to this posting must independently possess the eligibility to work in the United States, for any employer, at the date of hire. This position is ineligible for employment Visa sponsorship.

Overall Purpose 

The Senior Director, Product Innovation will lead innovation to expand and enrich our digital payment offerings. This role will explore frontier technologies such as agentic commerce, biometric enabled payments, and tokenized point-of-sale payments driving early-stage research, concept development, and business casing.   

Essential Functions

• Evaluates, scopes, and develops complex strategic product initiatives with the objective to expand and enrich products. 

• Develops and presents business cases for innovative initiatives to internal senior leadership and key external stakeholders  

• Analyzes opportunities, evaluates strategic fit, synthesizes findings, develops go-forward plans, and acts as part of the ongoing team to translate recommendations into plans and ultimately results. 

• Documents product requirements and collaborates with cross functional partners to design, implement, test, and deploy new product innovations. 

• Stays current with industry trends and emerging technologies that could enhance the organization’s capabilities and/or product offerings. 

• Engages with customers, partners, and internal leadership to gather insights and shape future product opportunities 

• Provides effective leadership, develops and manages a highly engaged, high-performance team.  

• Develops and maintains a deep understanding of our own product, our customer’ needs and competitive landscape. 

• Supports the company's commitment to risk management and protecting the integrity and confidentiality of systems and data 

Minimum Qualifications

• Education and/or experience typically obtained through the completion of a Bachelor’s degree. 

• 15+ years of experience in product management, partnerships, or strategy. 

• Knowledge of card-based payments systems including technical, business and legal considerations. 

• Knowledge of ecommerce, digital payments and network tokenization. 

• Experience deploying complex technology solutions to market. 

• Experience identifying market and business needs/gaps and translating those into fungible opportunities. 

• Experience conceptualizing and incubating new products and leading the customer development process from product ideation, MVP/PoC stages to general market launch. 

• Effective verbal and written communication and presentation skills. 

• Strong business acumen and effective leadership skills. 

• Background and drug screen. 

Preferred Qualifications

• Master’s Degree in a relevant field. 

• Experience bringing new/alternative payments solutions to market. 

• Comfort with ambiguity and a track record of leading through fast paced evolving environments. 

Physical Requirements

Working conditions consist of a normal office environment. Work is primarily sedentary and requires extensive use of a computer and involves sitting for periods of approximately four hours. Work may require occasional standing, walking, kneeling and reaching. Must be able to lift 10 pounds occasionally and/or negligible amount of force frequently. Requires visual acuity and dexterity to view, prepare, and manipulate documents and office equipment including personal computers. Requires the ability to communicate with internal and/or external customers.

Employee must be able to perform essential functions and physical requirements of position with or without reasonable accommodation.

The above job description is not intended to be an all-inclusive list of duties and standards of the position. Incumbents will follow