Financial Operations & Merchant Mandates Oversight Executive

At Bank of America, we are guided by a common purpose to help make financial lives better through the power of every connection. We do this by driving Responsible Growth and delivering for our clients, teammates, communities and shareholders every day.

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Bank of America is committed to an in-office culture that supports collaboration, engagement, and career development. Our approach includes clear in-office expectations, while providing an appropriate level of flexibility based on role-specific responsibilities and business needs. At Bank of America, you can build a successful career with opportunities to learn, grow, and make an impact. Join us!

Responsibilities:

This executive leads a highly tenured team of ~35 Merchant Services payment subject matter experts responsible for critical financial, network, operational, and risk capabilities across the Merchant Services business. The role operates as a player-coach, providing strategic leadership while maintaining the deep payments expertise necessary to personally engage in complex issues, challenge outcomes, and drive solutions.

The executive must connect detailed payment mechanics with broader business objectives, balancing merchant outcomes, financial performance, operational resiliency, regulatory and network requirements, and risk management.

Key Responsibilities

1. Lead Payment Network Releases and Mandates: Own execution of biannual payment network releases across multiple processors, internal technology platforms, and payment networks. Oversee the review of thousands of network bulletins and requirements, determine business applicability and financial impact, coordinate implementation across stakeholders, and validate accuracy following implementation.

2. Protect Merchant and Bank Economics: Provide oversight of significant payment network, processor, and vendor expenses through rigorous invoice review, reconciliation, and financial controls. Identify discrepancies, prevent unnecessary expense, protect merchant and bank revenue, and ensure accurate application of contractual and network economics.

3. Manage Client Volume Tiers and Pricing Incentives: Lead annual volume-tier reviews and client pricing incentive changes, ensuring changes are accurately calculated and implemented. Establish strong validation processes and drive rapid resolution when discrepancies or implementation issues are identified.

4. Serve as Merchant and Business Advocate: Represent the interests of merchants and the business when payment networks, regulators, processors, or other industry participants introduce new requirements. Assess operational and financial impacts, challenge requirements where appropriate, and ensure the necessary data, reporting, controls, and operating processes are established to support implementation and ongoing validation.

5. Maintain a Strong Risk and Control Environment: Own and continuously strengthen the risk and control framework across the function, including development and management of single-process inventories and associated controls. Proactively identify emerging risks and control gaps, escalate issues appropriately, and partner closely with Risk, Compliance, and Audit to resolve complex matters and deliver sustainable remediation.

6. Provide Deep Payments Expertise: Serve as a senior subject matter expert across interchange, network fees, merchant billing and pricing, acquiring and issuing economics, authorization through settlement transaction flows, debit routing, network rules, and applicable card regulations. Apply that expertise to identify financial, operational, and merchant impacts and inform executive decision-making.

7. Lead and Develop a High-Expertise Team: Provide strategic direction and hands-on leadership to an experienced team of payments professionals. Preserve and expand critical institutional knowledge, develop future subject matter experts, create accountability for outcomes, and establish strong succession and talent development across the organization.

8. Automate manual processes.

Required skills: "Must" have these skills to be minimally qualified

While this is an executive-level leadership position, the successful candidate must possess deep, hands-on Merchant Services and payments industry expertise, with the ability to translate complex payment economics and operational requirements into strategies that improve merchant outcomes and business profitability. Specific expertise should include:

1. Merchant acquiring and issuing economics, with a strong understanding of the complete four-party payments ecosystem and the financial relationship among merchants, acquirers/processors, networks and issuers.

2. Interchange and network fee management, including interchange qualification/optimization, network pricing structures, assessments and the financial implications of network changes.

3.  Merchant pricing and billing, including an understanding of merchant discount economics, billing accuracy, revenue realization, expense management and profitability.

4.  Merchant Services P&L management, with the ability to evaluate decisions through both the merchant/client lens and enterprise financial lens, balancing competitiveness, merchant value, revenue, cost and risk.

5.  End-to-end transaction flows, including authorization, clearing, settlement, funding, reconciliation and exception management across card-present, card-not-present and digital payment environments.

6.  Payment network rules and compliance, including the ability to interpret card-network mandates and rule changes, assess business and financial impact, and drive implementation across the organization.

7.  Payments regulatory acumen, including a strong working knowledge of the regulatory environment affecting merchant acquiring, debit and interchange.

8.  Financial controls and operational discipline, including reconciliation, invoice validation, pricing/billing controls, revenue leakage identification and expense recovery.

Shift:

Hours Per Week: