The Senior Platform Owner – Payments will lead and manage enterprise-scale payment platforms within the banking domain. The ideal candidate will possess deep expertise in banking payment systems, central bank clearing integrations, digital payment technologies, and large-scale platform operations. This role requires strong leadership capabilities to manage cross-functional teams, drive modernization initiatives, and ensure high availability, compliance, and operational excellence across payment ecosystems.
Roles & Responsibilities:
- Perform appropriate level of stakeholder management across IT and clients
- Serve as highest project internal escalation level
- Ensure projects are aligned to and deliver against the Business objectives
- Work as part of a multi-disciplinary team, in accordance with defined quality management practices, to achieve common objectives
- Ensure maintaining Data confidentiality
- Contribute to the yearly IT Roadmap ensuring that project costings and estimates are as accurate as possible.
- Work with Business representative to ensure alignment of delivery with Business demand
- Leading the product teams in delivering world class platform solutions
- Ensuring value added proposition in strategic vendor partnerships and aligning vendor product / industry roadmap of platforms with the business strategy thus enabling an effective business growth
- Acquire, groom and retain talent pertaining to the platform
- Motivate and lead a team of professionals
- Promoting diverse culture while sourcing talent
- Enable National leadership initiatives through grooming the right talent
Requirements:
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or related discipline.
- Relevant certifications in Payments, Banking Technology, Agile, PMP, ITIL, or Cloud technologies are an advantage.
- Experience working in large banks or financial institutions within UAE, GCC, or India preferred.
- 15+ years in banking technology and payment platforms
- Own and manage end-to-end payment platforms across the bank.
- Lead payment platform strategy, architecture, operations, and modernization initiatives.
- Manage payment systems supporting domestic and international payment processing.
- Handle integrations with Central Bank clearing systems and payment networks.
- Drive delivery and support for payment products including RTGS, IMPS, NEFT, SWIFT, ACH, WPS, and other regional payment clearing systems.
- Ensure platform stability, scalability, security, resilience, and regulatory compliance.
- Coordinate with business, operations, risk, compliance, infrastructure, cybersecurity, and vendor teams.
- Lead large technical and functional teams and foster a high-performance culture.
- Manage vendors, implementation partners, and third-party payment product providers.
- Define platform roadmap, budget planning, capacity management, and resource planning.
- Ensure SLA adherence, incident management, disaster recovery readiness, and operational excellence.
- Support digital transformation initiatives and cloud/platform modernization where applicable.
- Drive continuous improvement, automation, and innovation across payment operations.
- Provide leadership during audits, regulatory reviews, and compliance assessments.
- Strong experience in banking payment systems and payment hub platforms.
- Hands-on knowledge of domestic and international payment processing.
- Experience with Central Bank clearing integrations in India and UAE markets.
- Good understanding of RTGS, IMPS, NEFT, SWIFT, ACH, WPS, card payments, and ISO 20022 standards.
- Experience with enterprise integration platforms, APIs, middleware, and microservices architecture.
- Knowledge of high-availability systems, disaster recovery, and enterprise security standards.
- Understanding payment regulations, compliance, AML, screening sanctions, and operational risk.
- Experience in managing large-scale production environments and mission-critical systems.
- Exposure to Agile, DevOps, ITIL, and enterprise governance frameworks.
- Strong leadership and stakeholder management skills.
- Ability to lead large cross-functional and multicultural teams.
- Excellent communication and executive presentation skills.
- Strong decision-making and problem-solving capabilities.
- Ability to manage high-pressure production environments and critical incidents.
- Strategic thinking with strong execution focus.
- Capability to mentor and develop future technology leaders.
