Manager, Payments Strategy

About Us

Founded in 1992 in Dover, NH, Planet Fitness is one of the largest and fastest-growing franchisors and operators of fitness centers in the world by number of members and locations. As of March 31, 2026, Planet Fitness had approximately 21.5 million members and 2,909 clubs in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Canada, Panama, Mexico, Australia and Spain. The Company's mission is to enhance people's lives by providing a high-quality fitness experience in a welcoming, non-intimidating environment, which we call the Judgement Free Zone®. Approximately 90% of Planet Fitness clubs are owned and operated by independent business owners.

Overview

The Manager, Payments Strategy will be responsible for evaluating, developing, and implementing modern and effective payment and recovery strategies, dunning strategy, and collections execution across the full Planet Fitness ecosystem. This role will monitor payment processor performance, develop fraud prevention strategy, and drive payment fee optimization across ACH and card rails. The Manager, Payments Strategy will also serve as a key cross-functional partner to Technology and Finance leadership, providing data-driven recommendations on payment architecture to support the company's growing card volume and improve collections rates. This role follows a hybrid schedule and requires regular, in-person work at our Hampton, NH or Boston, MA office. Our hybrid model is M/T/W in office and TH/F are optional work-from-home. Candidates must reside within commuting distance of one of these locations. Fully remote work is not available for this role.

Responsibilities

• Payment Optimization & Architecture Design, deliver, and implement end-to-end payment attempt strategy including initial charge optimization, retry logic, and recovery workflows across ACH and card rails
• Develop and maintain a specialized strategy for neobank-issued accounts (e.g., Chime, Varo, CashApp) including evaluation of alternative payment methods
• Evaluate and recommend multi-processor strategy to reduce dependency on a single payment provider and optimize authorization performance
• Define and optimize member primary payment strategy across ACH and card, including evaluating which payment methods are accepted and incentivized
• Design and manage multi-channel dunning strategies (email, SMS, in-app) tailored to member behavior and return type
• Analyze involuntary churn data; connect payment failure patterns to member loss and translate recovery curve insights into actionable collections strategy improvements
• Monitor collections KPIs and drive recovery improvement while maintaining a positive member experience
• Partner with Billing, Operations and Accounting on write-off criteria and recommend policy standardization across corporate and franchise groups
• Ensure payment and collections strategies remain compliant with NACHA requirements and monitor for regulatory changes that require strategy adaptation
• Own the company’s payment fraud prevention posture: define the strategy, set risk thresholds, and drive continuous improvement as transaction volume and card mix grow
• Partner with Technology on fraud tooling selection, configuration, and ongoing performance monitoring
• Build and manage the chargeback program: prevention strategy, evidence standards, representment workflows, and win-rate optimization by tracking dispute rates and chargeback win rates by reason code; identify where representment ROI exceeds write-off
• Monitor processor performance, authorization rates, ACH return rates to identify optimization opportunities and drive strategic recommendations
• Own interchange and fee analysis across card types, payment methods, and routing decisions and flag anomalies and fee reduction opportunities

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Finance, Business, Accounting, or related field
• 5+ years of experience in finance operations, fintech, or consulting roles
• Experience in payment economics: interchange structures, fee optimization, and processor performance evaluation
• Chargeback and dispute management experience: reason code analysis, representment strategy, and fraud monitoring
• Strong analytical capability; comfortable reasoning from return codes, recovery curves, and cohort data
• Familiarity with payment processors, billing tools, and data visualization tools such as PowerBI
• Knowledge of fraud-prevention tools, bank account verification methods, and authentication frameworks
• Experience with chargeback or representment platforms and pre-dispute alert services
• Exposure to SOX-controlled environments
• Extremely detail-oriented, efficient, and organized with an exceptional ability to establish priorities and objectives
• Excellent presentation and communication skills along with the ability to communicate effectively across all levels of the organization
• Able to establish and maintain effective, collaborative work relationships with diverse individuals, internally and externally
• Creative, progressive, thought leadership with the ability to influence at all levels of the organization
• Exhibits comfort, ease, and flexibility working in an extremely fast-paced ever-changing, deadline-driven environment
• Cooperative team player with an upbeat, positive, “can-do” attitude!

Perks

• Comprehensive benefits package to eligible employees which includes the core medical, dental, vision, life and disability as well as supplemental accident, hospital and critical illness coverage options
• Paid parental leave
• Tuition reimbursement
• Free Black Card membership
• Learning and development programs
• A whole host of engagement activities
• 401(k) Plan with safe harbor employer matching
• Employee stock purchase plan
• Annual corporate bonus incentive program based on company financial and personal performance