Director, Enterprise Payments Strategy

About Network & Acquiring Solutions

As part of the Global Merchant & Network Services group (GMNS), the Network & Acquirer Solutions (NAS) team is at the core of American Express, uniquely positioned to support every business unit and customer across the Enterprise. The American Express Network enables over $1.6 trillion in annual spend, serving our Issuers and Acquirers in more than 170 markets worldwide. We are driving a strategic, multi-year Enterprise Payments program to bring all payments together into a center of excellence to drive operational excellence for payment execution, enable innovative payment products, services, and capabilities to be built effectively and efficiently, support our BU strategies more closely, and deliver on our customers’ evolving payment needs.

About the Role

This newly created role of Director, Enterprise Payments Strategy is an exciting opportunity to establish and drive the Enterprise Payments transformation, vision, priorities and innovation. The incumbent will be an integral leader within a large scale, enterprise-wide program established to redesign our payment execution model, optimise and de-risk payments, offer best in class payments processing, and create safe and compliant enterprise payments services to ultimately drive an unparalleled payments experience for our customers.

The Director, Enterprise Payments Strategy will develop the company’s enterprise payments strategy to drive optimization, innovation, efficiency, and revenue growth based on competitive analysis, external landscape, business objectives, and . This is a unique opportunity to shape the foundation of a critical new. enterprise function and drive the strategic development of an enterprise payment service.

Key Responsibilities

• Strategic Thought Leadership: Partner with business stakeholders to develop and evolve the enterprise payments strategy, ensuring alignment with the company’s overall business objectives and priorities as well as the competitive & regulatory lamdscape.
• Payments Optimization: Assess and optimize payment processes, operating models, settlement models, and partnerships to ensure seamless and cost efficient payment processing across multiple bank payment rails (e.g., ACH, wire, etc.) globally
• Competitive Assessment: Develop a comprehensive assessment of the competitive environment including competitor benchmarking, emerging technologies, customer buying behavior, and payment trends, to inform the enterprise payments strategy.
• Regulatory & Compliance Assessment: Monitor major payments regulatory & governing bodies (e.g., CFPB, NACHA, PSD2, BIS, etc.) to stay abreast of new payment regulations, evolving compliance requirements, and payment network rule changes that may impact the company’s payments processing, products, strategy, policies, and controls.
• Strategic Intiatives: Drive key strategic initiatives spanning product-related strategies (e.g., real time payments strategy), infrastructure optimization strategies (e.g., direct clearing strategy), and operating model enhancements (e.g., streamlining product development process), and
• Payments Expertise: Consolidate and disseminate payments knowledge – including industry expertise and internal payments-related knowledge about current state payments use cases and operating models across the company.
• Industry Engagement: Develop industry engagement strategy to stay ahead of emerging trends and influence payment policies including developing strategic relationships with payment networks and payment processors and driving the American Express perspective in industry forums and industry working groups, e.g., NACHA, Faster Payments Council, etc.<