Product Risk Director

Product Risk Director

The Product Risk Director is responsible for defining and executing the strategic vision for risk and fraud capabilities across the company's payments ecosystem. This role works in close partnership with Risk, Compliance, Engineering, Data Science, and Commercial leaders to deliver scalable, data-driven risk solutions that protect the platform while enabling business growth. As a senior product leader, this role owns the end-to-end risk product portfolio, including fraud prevention, transaction monitoring, identity verification, and dispute management. The Director ensures risk capabilities are embedded across all core products (payments, wallets, issuing, acquiring) and aligned with regulatory requirements, customer experience goals, and financial performance targets.

Responsibilities:

• Define and drive the multi-year strategy and roadmap for risk and fraud products across the organization.
• Own the risk product portfolio, ensuring alignment with company objectives, regulatory requirements, and market needs.
• Partner with Risk, Compliance, and Legal leadership to translate regulatory obligations and risk policies into scalable product solutions.
• Collaborate with Engineering and Architecture to build robust, scalable risk infrastructure, decisioning engines, and APIs.
• Drive integration of risk capabilities across payments, wallets, issuing, acquiring, and partner ecosystems.
• Establish and monitor key performance indicators, including fraud rates, false positives, approval rates, dispute ratios, and operational efficiency, and lead initiatives to improve performance.
• Partner with Sales, and Partnerships teams to position risk capabilities as a competitive advantage and support client engagements.
• Proactively identify and commercialize opportunities to monetize the risk product portfolio, ensuring fraud, compliance, identity, transaction monitoring, and dispute capabilities are not only protective controls but also scalable value-added services that generate incremental revenue across the company's payments ecosystem.
• Lead cross-functional initiatives to enhance risk automation, operational efficiency, and optimization.

Qualifications:

• Bachelors degree or educational equivalent; or relevant experience in lieu of a degree, required.
• 10+ years of product management experience, with significant leadership experience in risk, fraud, payments, or financial services.
• Proven track record of leading product teams and delivering complex, cross-functional initiatives at scale.
• Deep understanding of the payments ecosystem, including acquiring, issuing, wallets, and payment processing.
• Strong expertise in fraud prevention, transaction monitoring, identity verification, disputes/chargebacks, and risk decisioning frameworks.
• Experience working with data science teams and machine learning-driven products.
• Strong understanding of regulatory and compliance frameworks (e.g., AML, KYC, PSD2, card scheme rules).
• Demonstrated ability to influence senior stakeholders and align cross-functional teams.
• Experience managing product portfolios, budgets, and capital allocation processes.
• Excellent communication and executive presence, with experience presenting to C-level leadership and external partners.