VP Payments Operations Manager (Hybrid)

Position Summary

Work Arrangement: This position is available as a hybrid position in our Sioux Falls, SD or Wilmington, DE office.

About the Role

Oversee the daily operations and support the long-term strategy of payments at the Bank, which could include ACH, Wires, Real-Time Payments, FedNow, and Push to Card transactions. Ensure processing for clients, originators, and processors are handled timely, efficiently, with proper redundancy, securely, and fully compliant with rules and regulations. Identify trends in the market and work with senior leaders in the Payments organizations to ensure operational support for new payment options, new client onboarding, and sales support to enable revenue growth.

Responsibilities

• Create a high-performance culture, emphasizing core management leadership initiatives and developing and executing on current and future strategies that align with strategic goals.
• Represent Payment Operations and effectively collaborate with important functional stakeholders including Payments, IT, and VMO to provide operational solutions to strategic business needs.
• Identify trends in the marketplace and work across senior leadership in the Payments space to demonstrate operational capabilities to meet client demands or future opportunities.
• Service client needs including presenting solutions for payment support and showcasing capabilities to enhance client experience.
• Effectively lead clients during onboarding process to ensure proper integration, testing, documentation, and adherence to rules and regulations.
• Drive, ensure, and assist with the design and monitoring of disaster recovery and business continuity plans and procedures for Payment Operations.
• Establish monitoring parameters to provide an early warning of issues and/or problems with file transfer and vendor processes.
• Establish appropriate escalation paths to ensure notification of and resolution of all issues.
• Provide management and oversight into the change management process for payment systems projects, conversions, and implementations.
• Work with payments teams and vendors to ensure future product releases cover changes in business needs and ensure testing and quality assurance are performed per department policies and procedures, documentation is updated, department staff are trained on new procedures or processes, and system changes or client go-live events are communicated timely to all affected bank teams.
• Establish monitoring of payment transaction and administration activities to detect issues and respond to problems quickly.
• Approve payment transactions requiring management approval levels.
• Oversee work between internal clients, vendors, and IT to resolve system and other technical issues affecting file processing.
• Determine scope of problem including identifying clients who may be impacted by the issue, estimated time to resolve issue, contact internal clients and provide status updates, and determine the need to switch to alternate or contingency processing workflow/platforms to meet processing deadlines.
• Alert leadership to major issues and recommendations.
• Participate in all RFPs for third-party fintech providers to ensure all solutions will integrate smoothly with existing platforms and processes and to ensure that solutions can be supported by Payment Operations.
• Analyze and monitor ongoing opportunities to maximize operational and systemic efficiencies and to reinforce core system and procedural redundancies.
• Present recommendations to senior leadership to continually improve and enhance operational processes and technologies supporting Payment Operations.
• Partner with the systems development teams to build additional functionality, notifications, and other application and platform modifications.
• Maintain awareness of regulatory updates impacting payment types.
• Act as the primary escalation contact for client relationship managers for elevated client issues.
• Perform other duties as assigned.

Qualifications

• Undergraduate degree in a related field or an equivalent combination of training and experience.
• 12 years financial industry experience, with 7 years managing payment operations team with strict adherence to critical daily deadlines.
• Payments accreditations such as Accredited ACH professional (AAP), Electronic Transactions Association (ETA) CPP, SWIFT, Accredited Payments Risk Professional, Certified Card Payments Professional, etc.