VP, Strategy & Corporate Development

Nice to Meet You! We are Ascenda

Ascenda provides the rewards infrastructure for leading financial services brands across the world.

Our clients include the world’s largest banks, top tier card issuers and fintechs who utilise our rewards infrastructure to power their earn & burn rewards programs. These include American Express, CapitalOne, HSBC, Brex, Virgin Money, SMBC, ICBC, Bradesco, ANZ, HDFC and Top 10 financial services brands in many other countries.

With a best-in-class technology suite and the world’s broadest rewards content marketplace, we are the engine behind winning premium rewards propositions for financial services all around the globe.

Our clients are spread across continents, and we serve over 1 billion customers globally. No matter where you are in the world, you’ll recognize our footprint!

We believe that nothing should stand in the way of companies who strive to drive growth via compelling and effortless rewards propositions that their customers love.

Ascenda was founded in 2014 and today employs 200 people across 20 countries. Our team is as globally diverse as our clients: our CPO is based in Seattle, CFO in Boston, Head of Client Success in Sydney, and our CTO in Singapore.

Welcome to the future of customer growth. Join us as we shape the future of rewards in financial services!

Why We Do What We Do

The world of financial services has entered an extremely exciting chapter. Cashless forms of payment, including cards, are growing quickly. And competition globally is becoming ever more intense as ambitious fintech brands challenge the traditional players to deliver more value.

The result? Rewards expenditure is at an all-time high! Because great rewards are a proven way to drive growth and differentiate in financial services. Brands are collectively investing over $100 billion (!) per year just to reward card spend alone! And now, they’re increasingly also looking to add rewards to other products, in a push to recognize the full customer relationship and enhance their ability to cross-sell.

But the industry has a massive problem when it comes to rewards: gold standard programs, like Amex Membership Rewards, require a myriad of ingredients to bring to life. Complex in-house builds combined with countless external partnerships - something only the biggest brands with the deepest pockets can afford. The rest of the industry is stuck at the basics: cash-back, or gift cards at best. Missing out on the opportunity to differentiate and truly accelerate their growth with impactful incentives.

That’s where Ascenda comes in. Our “one-stop” platform enables any financial institution, whether traditional or challenger, large or small, to power up world-class premium rewards at speed and with ease. In 180 markets around the world and in 30 languages.

On the supply side of our ecosystem, merchant partners win equally big! Brands that make their content available via Ascenda’s rewards marketplace benefit from access to hundreds of millions of high-value FI customers globally. Boosting their sales, unlocking new markets and growing their visibility. All enabled by our AI-native personalization engine that matches end users with the right content to ensure relevance and greatest ROI.

The Role: VP, Strategy & Corporate Development

Reporting directly to Co-Founder Sebastian Grobys, the Strategy & Corporate Development team is a global high-caliber group that acts as both in-house ‘think-tank’ and hands-on business development engine for the company’s most strategic growth opportunities.

Join our CEO and Chief Product Officer in the growing Seattle office and play a center-stage role as Ascenda executes its ambitious vision of becoming the world’s most powerful human incentive engine.

Ready for action? This is no traditional strategy team that prepares recommendations which may or may not get implemented. You’ll be personally engaging with prospective clients, partners and M&A targets to explore new business models, working with product & engineering teams to validate bold innovations, and engaging directly with Ascenda’s C-Suite on shaping the company’s 10x growth roadmap.

The Strategy & Corporate Development team serves the CEO and his direct reports across the following key pillars:

Sales:

• lead the pitch process (all the way to deal signing) for Ascenda’s largest and most complex new financial services client opportunities, including c