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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

What’s it all about?

The VP Risk Strategy, Supervisory & Optimisation (RSSO) role will lead the Commercial Risk Business Partners, the supervisory relationships and build the Europe Risk Strategy to deliver against Visas Strategic priorities. The role reports to the VEL Chief Risk Officer and where appropriate will deputise for the CRO.

The role must be a strategic leader with the ability to operate, influence and become a trusted partner with the senior leaders of Visa Europe and Global Risk Centres of excellence, with the ability to represent the Visa Risk function. This highly visible role has end to end regional accountability and responsibility for developing a comprehensive, strong and fully embedded Risk Strategy. The individual will be regarded as a trusted business partner by executive management to make key risk decisions, using risk and business expertise. The role supports the VEL CRO in agreeing, setting and delivering the Risk Strategy and goals to support the VEL business strategy and working within the Global Risk Frameworks and objectives, as well as the local regulatory requirements.

This is a senior leadership role that will involve frequent collaboration with the European executive team on high impact initiatives and efforts. The successful candidate will be a strategic thinker, ideally with a background in Strategy and Regulation.

This person will be recognized as a leader by peers and executive management, will think strategically and holistically about the business, be capable of identifying and resolving issues, and excel at quickly grasping and clearly communicating complex topics.

Specific / Key Responsibilities Include

Whilst establishing a high functioning RSSO team in Europe this role has three key responsibilities.

Strategy

• Develop, lead and deliver the overall VEL Risk Strategy that supports Visa’s ambition to grow the business into new areas and in coordination with Global Visa. This will require developing a Europe regional strategy across multiple business verticals, with Visa inc., and in coordination with leadership across multiple regions and European clusters.
• Working collaboratively with other departments in Risk Europe and Global Risk to:
• a. Formulate and deliver the European Risk Strategy
• b. Develop and maintain policy, direction, and implementation of the Risk Strategy and priorities
• c. Deliver appropriate consistency in delivering key projects
• d. Deliver immediate, near-, and long-term roadmap for Risk Strategy across the Europe region
  
  

• Using management information, metrics and analysis to inform business decision-making and to measure progress against goals and desirable outcomes
• Accountable for the delivery of Risk oversight on strategic projects supporting the VISA Europe business strategy such as;
• VEL’s FY25 Risk Strategy
• Visa’s 2030 Strategy
• Annual Budget
  
  

• Lead oversight of strategic and growth risk to facilitate sustainable business growth, working with the business to identify risks to strategy and objectives, and working with senior leadership to address and overcome these
• Evolution of the Risk Country Plans to find further revenue streams while protecting the ecosystem
• Creation of new revenue streams e.g. operational resilience and cybersecurity packages
• Supporting the expansion of the A2A scheme and A2A protect into the ecosystem
• New segments of end consumers and strategies to maximise revenue in affluent and also wider cross boarder areas.
• Drive new regional initiatives to achieve strategic risk outcomes. Apply a variety of frameworks and strategies to solve business problems and opportunities
• Identify the barriers to success for the business and design strategies to address these, delivered through the wider team and others in Risk
• Creates clear strategic priorities for the business and aligns resources accordingly
  
  
Supervisory

Lead the Supervisory Risk Function to operate as a proactive, strategic and high impact Supervisory Risk team, leading all aspects of supervisory engagement in the UK and EU.

• Develop and deliver an overall strategy for proactively fostering positive and cooperative relationships with those regulators across the Europe region which have supervisory powers over VEL, meeting expectations of regulators and internal clients (including Government Engagement, Legal, Compliance, Products, Finance).
• Develop and deliver a mature framework for identifying, monitoring, and managing relationships with those regulators across the Europe region which have supervisory powers over VEL for the purpose of:
• Supporting supervisory engagements
• Ensuring continued compliance with local supervisory requirements
• Ensuring a consistent approach for topics that are relevant, not only across the Europe region but also across other Global regions, and
• Proactively managing the growing interest from multiple regulators
  
  

• Establishing and maintaining efficient and effective processes, procedures and tools for fulfilling the objectives of this role, including management of:
• Supervisory reporting obligations from VEL’s regulatory supervisors across the Europe region
• Responses to supervisory inquiries from VEL’s regulatory supervisors across the Europe region
• Documentation on regulatory requests and responses
  
  

• Establishing and maintaining a structured approach to working in partnership with other functions in VEL which have regulatory responsibilities, including Government Engagement, Compliance and Legal, leveraging respective skills and experience to deliver more than the sum of the parts, ensuring a coordinated approach, an articulated external “single voice”, and avoiding unnecessary duplication
• Establishing and maintaining excellent professional working relationships with:
• Relevant internal stakeholders, including at VEL’s most senior levels, for example the Chairman and Non-Executive Directors, and
• The VP Regulatory Risk and Governance and Supervisory Risk Directors in other regions to drive a consistent approach for topics that are relevant across regions and to share best practice in managing supervisory relations
• Coordinating timely and quality responses to reporting requirements and requests from VEL’s regulatory supervisors across the Europe region
• Supporting VEL to secure or renew regulatory operating licenses in the Europe region
• Providing top quality written and verbal briefings to senior internal stakeholders (including Board members)
• Maintaining a strong awareness of regulatory developments in payments and financial services across the Europe region for the purpose of providing insights into emerging topics impacting the supervision of VEL
• Providing support to the Chief Risk Officer, Europe in identifying key regulatory and supervisory topics for escalation to the VEL leadership team, Board and Global Risk
• Lead the Governance team in Risk to streamline risk reporting, whilst driving up the quality and setting a consistent narrative across VEL for senior management and key governance forums as well as for regulators
• Drive enhancements to the governance approach to ensure regulatory and VEL Board requirements are met without adding undue process
• Lead the Supervisory Risk team through the ECB engagement for SIPS designation of VEL branch, including strengthening the understanding of ECB’s priorities and ECB’s understanding of our business
• Lead the Supervisory Risk team to strengthen BoE’s understanding of Visa, how the company operates, key risks and risk profile, how risk is managed, and deliver on BoE and regulators supervisory priorities
• Support Supervisory and Internal Audit requirements
  

Optimisation

• Lead, motivate and guide the Europe RSSO team
• Design & implement metrics & reporting to help identify, monitor and measure OKR’s and execution lists for timely action in collaboration with the RELT .
• Monitor the economic, political, and business environment to ensure timely risk identification and mitigation.
• Ensure the risk frameworks meet the appropriate regulatory expectations, the needs of VEL business, complies with Global framework and adequately mitigates risk while balancing risk / reward
• Create the engagement strategy for Risk on second line engagement with the business, which will be delivered through the team and others across Risk
• Contextualisation of complex business issues in order to be able to advise senior leaders on the critical underlying risks and the interdependencies
• Identify the opportunities to improve and enhance the second line approach with the business and oversee the Risk work to address these issues
• Build strong relationships with the European senior leadership team to deliver successful risk outcomes for them
• Ensure risk themes and barriers to success are identified through the work of the team and hold others accountable for overcoming those barriers
• Building strong relationships to cross silos:
• Work closely across Risk Europe Management teams
• Work closely with Global Risk and the European Leadership Team
• Coordinate with Regional Cluster Business Leads and Regional Risk Leadership
• Work closely with relevant Global Centres of Excellence leadership
• Work closely with other VEL Functional leadership
  
  

Supporting, training and sharing expertise with other colleagues in VEL and globally

Develop and lead a “best in class” RSSO department, hiring and maintaining a motivated team recognised by Executive Management and Global Risk Executives as:

• Experts in their field
• Professional and business-aware
• Proactive and solutions-focused
• Constructive and proportionate in their challenge
• Ensures that decisions are made in a timely manner without over analysing data, holds others accountable for meeting goals
• Develop clear and concise executive level communications. Communicate recommendations to senior management, other executive, functional, or regional staff and management in a clear, concise and impactful way
• Support NBIA post implementation reviews to support reviews of products and new initiatives to meet regulatory requirements. Assist global in refreshing the NBIA process end-to-end.
  
  

Qualifications

• Extensive senior leadership experience, with a combination of risk, business and operating experience preferred
• Flexible, intellectually curious, creative thinker with the ability to define business trade-offs, generate out-of-the-box solutions and manage uncertainty
• Ability to lead and influence decisions of others
• Strong management skills with experience managing and building a high performing team, including recruiting and retaining talent, and developing team members
• Ability to structure and manage complex cross-enterprise projects and processes with multiple stakeholders
• Proven leader, with experience leading and executing complex, cross-functional strategic projects
• Strong interpersonal skills with presence and the ability to clearly communicate compelling messages to senior and executive management, clients, peers, and team members
• Ability to work with limited direction, usually within a complex and often ambiguous environment, to drive rigorous, fact-based recommendations to senior and executive management, while supporting syndication with stakeholders across the organization
• Knowledge of developing and deploying new business and technology strategies for risk mitigation and risk services
• Knowledge, understanding and experience of risk management practices in financial services
• Proven experience of leading and engaging multiple stakeholders, particularly senior leadership of internal and external clients, on a given strategy or risk capability
• Knowledge of the financial sector
• Knowledge of the UK and wider European payments and / or financial services industry
• Knowledge and experience of Visa Europe payment system, its governance principles and Visa Europe’s compliance framework
• Knowledge and understanding of relevant regulation
• Proven ability to build credible-long term effective working relationships, both internally and externally
• Experienced in preparing/reviewing/delivering executive level communications, both written and oral
  
  

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.