About Us

Visa is a world leader in payments technology, facilitating transactions between consumers, merchants, financial institutions and government entities across more than 200 countries and territories, dedicated to uplifting everyone, everywhere by being the best way to pay and be paid.

At Visa, you'll have the opportunity to create impact at scale — tackling meaningful challenges, growing your skills and seeing your contributions impact lives around the world.

Join Visa and do work that matters – to you, to your community, and to the world. Progress starts with you.

Job Description

As Senior Director, Implementation, you will lead a professional services organization within Client Services, as part of the Onboarding and Implementation function, reporting to the VP of Onboarding and Implementation for Europe.

You will partner externally with clients and partners, and internally with Sales, Product, Technology, and Client Services teams, to implement and enhance Visa products and services for financial institutions, merchants, third-party processors, and other payment partners across Europe, while also connecting with global teams where clients operate internationally.

both functional and technical leadership to your teams

You will provide both functional and technical leadership, building a strong, cohesive, high-performing team of people managers and individual contributors through active coaching, clear strategic and tactical direction, and disciplined delivery. With teams based across Europe and largely structured in hub locations, proven experience leading multi-location teams is essential. While your primary focus will be Europe, you will also collaborate closely with implementation teams in other regions to support clients with a global footprint.

You will be an experienced senior people leader, ideally with responsibility for teams of around 20–30 employees, with a proven track record of developing managers, growing talent at entry level and beyond, and building highly efficient, productive teams.

Responsibilities

• Managing and monitoring overall execution of onboarding and implementation projects and connected services across Europe, in close collaboration and alignment/ forward planning with Client Success, Sales, Product, Technology and other Visa teams, and with our external Clients & Processors, as relevant.
• Tracking consistently against OKRs at all team and individual levels and driving action plans to improve productivity and quality of deliverables, as continuous improvement
• Ensuring strict adherence across the team executing against a singular, consistent implementation approach (leveraging the Visa Global Implementation Policy and Standards/ Global Cross Regional Policy), to accelerate the activation and adoption of Visa products and services, maintaining and enhancing our connectivity and network, whilst delivering world-class deliverables leading to high Net Promoter Score (NPS).
• Building a strong, cohesive high performing team through the hiring and development of a diverse team across different job levels and setting high standards alongside the relevant coaching, development and training needs required.
• Administer and manage a clear performance management process throughout the year, to ensure full clarity with individuals on their performance throughout the year, offering guidance, support opportunities to improve or to share their best practices and nurture and grow others.
• Being a strong, trusted partner to all Visa Europe Client Success and other CS Leadership Teams, and instilling strong collaboration with Implementation, CSM and other CS Teams, encouraging proactive and collective handover points for outstanding client experience.
• Driving a practice of lessons learned and active review of projects, to instil/ enforce best practices across Europe, with the relevant development required to achieve this.
• Providing leadership, strategic direction and coaching the direct reports of managers and individual contributors, establishing a client focused, strong performance-based culture
• Translating broad strategies into specific objectives and action plans, that is clear for all job levels in the organization in what they need to deliver and ensure active monitoring and their execution within defined timelines.
• Developing regular management and team/ individual reporting to support active and continuous monitoring of work adherence within defined blueprints and SLAs
• Working closely with Product, Sales/ Market and Technology teams to develop requirements that meet specific market, client archetypes, endpoint connectivity acceptance, issuer or issuer/processor interfacing unique needs, to ensure that new products are services are most easily implemented and supportable.
• Supporting attainment of industry best practice implementation service standards to position Visa ahead of competitors.
• Supporting sales and client success market and cluster teams across Europe in business development efforts from an implementation perspective.
• Being a strong role model to build close collaborative relationships and partnership with leaders in Client Success, Sales, Product, Technology and wider to facilitate successful execution of projects across Europe and Client types.
• Driving continuous improvement of performance, cost effectiveness & compliance in delivery of Europe Implementation services to Visa clients.
• Actively maintaining and expanding current knowledge of technologies, products, services, methods and applications and implementing new approaches and practices as required.
• Building and nurturing rapport with Client Implementation teams across Visa Inc. (AP, CEMEA, LAC, NA regions) to exchange, learn and leverage best practices.
• Instilling regular monitoring progress and quality of all implementation projects by all levels of personnel within the team to proactively manage delays and risks/ constraints.
• Ensuring strong project management standards and controls are implemented and consistently followed in the delivery of services to clients, with constant monitoring and management of performance as required.
• Creating an effective protocol with CS Cluster leaders of new opportunities to drive an implementation forward planning forecast of resources and skills, documentation of client needs and input from past engagements to plan and improve services rendered and to develop material to proactively input into RFP and business cases.
• Proactively identifying opportunities to improve both European & Global implementation processes, procedures, best practices and SLAs.
  
  

This is a hybrid position. Expectation of 3 days in office.

Qualifications

• Extensive experience leading a broad range of delivery, from low- to medium-complexity projects to large, complex technical programmes with multiple dependencies across products, countries, and technical infrastructures.
• Significant Professional Services experience across end-to-end implementation lifecycles, including actively managing large-scale cross-regional or global implementation programmes within the financial services or payments industry, particularly those involving complex technology, infrastructure change, and product adoption.
• Proven leadership experience managing teams across geographies and career levels, with strong performance management, coaching, development, and succession planning.
• Demonstrated ability to coach and mentor team members, building high-performing teams and maximizing individual potential.
• Experience leading change and transformation initiatives, including process optimization, adoption of new technologies, and aligning teams to execute effectively.
• Strong financial acumen, ideally including experience managing actuals against targets, driving profitability, and improving productivity.
• Strong ability to assess existing processes, identify opportunities for optimization, and make decisions based on data-driven insights.
• Excellent interpersonal skills, with the ability to build effective working relationships and influence stakeholders at all levels of management.
• High level of self-motivation, initiative, and drive, with the ability to operate effectively as a collaborative cross-functional team player.
• Subject matter expertise across multiple stages of the project lifecycle, gained through extensive experience supporting clients, new product initiatives, and product enhancements within a payments processing, financial services, or consulting environment.
• Ability to develop new methods, improve existing approaches, and contribute to new procedures, systems, products, or services.
• Strong strategic problem-solving skills, with the ability to anticipate challenges, identify opportunities, build business cases, and lead the successful implementation of change.
• Ability to translate complex client business requirements into technical requirements for the configuration and implementation of Visa products and services.
• Outstanding presentation, verbal, and written communication skills in English.
• Strong working knowledge of payment systems, payment networks, processing services, and transaction processing in a multi-party model.
• Demonstrated understanding of the broad range of systems, products, and services across the payments ecosystem.
• Strong technical aptitude, gained through experience as a technical architect, project manager, or technical individual contributor.
• Experience in bankcard operations, complex client environments, or a similar financial services setting is preferred.
• Project management certification such as PMI, PRINCE2, or equivalent is preferred.
• Agile certification is also preferred.
• Bachelor’s degree or advanced degree (for example Master’s, MBA, JD, or MD) preferred.
  
  

Visa is an EEO Employer

Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability or protected veteran status. Visa will also consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with EEOC guidelines and applicable local law.