Payment Systems Business Analyst / Product Owner

Payment Systems Business Analyst / Product Owner

Location: Lincolnshire, IL | Type: Full-Time

We are seeking an experienced Payment Systems Business Analyst / Product Owner to lead the requirements gathering, implementation, and ongoing management of our payment processor and gateway solutions. This role bridges business stakeholders, technology teams, and third-party payment vendors to deliver seamless, secure, and scalable payment experiences. The ideal candidate combines deep payments domain expertise with strong analytical and product ownership skills.

Key Responsibilities

Requirements Gathering & Analysis

• Serve as the primary point of contact for eliciting, documenting, and validating business and technical requirements for new payment processor and gateway implementations.

• Conduct stakeholder interviews, workshops, and process-mapping sessions with finance, operations, engineering, compliance, and customer experience teams.

• Translate complex business needs into clear, actionable user stories, use cases, process flows, and functional specifications.

• Define and document end-to-end payment flows including authorization, capture, settlement, refunds, chargebacks, and reconciliation.

• Identify and document integration requirements across internal systems and external payment vendors.

Product Ownership

• Own and maintain the payment systems product backlog; prioritize features and enhancements in alignment with business goals, compliance requirements, and technical feasibility.

• Author and refine user stories with detailed acceptance criteria; partner with development teams through sprint planning, grooming, and retrospectives.

• Serve as the primary decision-maker for scope, trade-offs, and prioritization within the payments product domain.

• Define and track key success metrics (authorization rates, decline rates, processing costs, uptime, transaction throughput) and drive continuous improvement.

Payment Processor & Gateway Implementation

• Lead discovery and evaluation of payment processors, gateways, and Payment Service Providers (PSPs) (e.g., Stripe, Adyen, Braintree, Worldpay, Chase Paymentech); support RFP/RFI processes and vendor selection.

• Manage end-to-end implementation lifecycle: scoping, vendor onboarding, integration design, UAT, go-live readiness, and post-launch stabilization.

• Collaborate with engineering and QA teams to define integration specifications (REST APIs, webhooks, tokenization, 3DS2, etc.) and validate implementations.

• Coordinate with payment networks (Visa, Mastercard, etc.) and acquiring banks as needed during certifications and compliance reviews.

Ongoing Maintenance & Optimization

• Monitor payment platform performance and proactively identify issues, degradations, or optimization opportunities.

• Manage change requests, platform upgrades, and new feature rollouts in partnership with vendors and internal teams.

• Conduct regular vendor reviews and performance benchmarking; escalate issues and drive resolution SLAs.

• Support A/B testing and optimization initiatives to improve authorization rates, reduce friction, and lower processing costs.

Operational Insights & Enhancements

• Define and own operational reporting frameworks that provide visibility into payment health across all channels and vendors — including authorization rates, decline reasons, chargebacks, settlement timing, and processing costs.

• Partner with data and analytics teams to build dashboards and operational scorecards that surface actionable insights for finance, operations, and technology leadership.

• Conduct regular deep-dive analyses on payment trends, failure patterns, and vendor performance to identify root causes and drive continuous improvement initiatives.

• Translate operational data into concrete product and process enhancements — such as intelligent retry logic, decline recovery flows, dynamic routing rules, and fee optimization strategies.

• Lead post-incident reviews for payment outages or degradations; document findings and drive systemic improvements to prevent recurrence.

• Benchmark payment operations against industry standards and competitive best practices; develop business cases for enhancements with measurable ROI.

• Collaborate with finance and accounting teams to streamline reconciliation, reduce exceptions, and improve end-of-day settlement accuracy across multi-vendor environments.

• Champion a culture of operational excellence by