Associate Program Manager

Lead is a fintech building banking infrastructure for embedded financial products and services. We operate an FDIC-insured bank headquartered in Kansas City, Missouri.  Additionally, we have offices in San Francisco, Sunnyvale, and New York City, where our technical, product, design, and legal teams operate.

We are built for a constantly evolving financial landscape, where new ventures and technological advancements emerge daily. Guided by a team of entrepreneurs and technologists with decades of experience navigating intricate banking and payments regulations, Lead blends regulatory and technological expertise to help our fintech partners scale their operations with compliance and creativity.

Simply put, Lead offers the essential attributes that every fintech seeks in a partner bank. First, unparalleled technical expertise from a distinguished team of developers with an extensive understanding of the banking and payments systems. Second, oversight expertise, automated compliance systems, and bespoke program management to navigate the ever-shifting regulatory landscape. Finally, a commitment to transparency and operational rigor to ensure everyone’s money does what it’s supposed to do. 

Role Description:

As an Associate Program Manager, you will play a pivotal role in ensuring oversight of and an outstanding client experience for our internal stakeholders as well as our fintech Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) and Payments strategic partners. In this role, you will report to a Senior Program Manager and be responsible for serving as a liaison between other internal or external stakeholders, ensuring effective communication and coordination throughout the partner lifecycle. The key responsibilities of this position include managing multiple tasks, ushering deliverables through to completion, maintaining awareness of the status of program and project milestones and reporting out on status completion.

In this role you will:

• Manage the entire lifecycle of relationships with Lead’s highly valued fintech strategic partnerships, including onboarding, ongoing monitoring, and eventual offboarding, under the guidance and direction of Senior Program Managers

• Serve as the primary point-of-contact and bridge between external partners and internal teams on all aspects of the relationship

• Lead and coordinate external and internal facing partnership meetings, inclusive of taking notes, managing deliverables & action items, ongoing requests and tracking progress of partner implementation

• Manage tracking of all partner onboarding and ongoing program management activities such as open requests, past due items, scheduling, setting up needed workspaces using  program/project management tools, and upkeeping maintenance

• Assist partners with training and any questions, including  trouble shooting issues related to Lead’s workspace tools, processes and systems

• Facilitate content governance and change management across external-facing materials, ensuring consistency and maintaining version control

• Develop, design and maintain partnership metrics and reporting (including program onboarding status, dependencies or roadblocks)

• Communicate project expectations and timelines to all internal stakeholders in a timely and concise manner

• Collaborate with internal teams to gather project requirements, define scope, and develop accurate time estimates for deliverables

• Demonstrate exceptional organizational skills by effectively prioritizing workloads within and across project teams in a rapidly changing and fast-paced environment

• Support other program managers in partner meetings, including taking meeting minutes, action item tracking, materials preparation and related logistics

• Provide regular project status updates to team members, clients, and senior management, highlighting achievements, challenges, and next steps

• Participate in and complete other tasks, projects and team initiatives as assigned in between day-to-day activities

• Perform other duties as assigned

Qualifications:

• A bachelor's degree or equivalent

• 2-3 years of project or program management experience

• Financial services experience (either at a financial institution or fintech company) is a plus

• Comfort with program/project management tools like Asana, GSuites, Confluence, or ability to learn new systems and team workflows quickly

• Excellent technical troubleshooting and process implementation skills

• Ability to plan, set priorities, organize, and coordinate work with others.

• Be action-oriented, with strong organization skills and attention t