Senior Director, Merchant Client Success

Visa is a world leader in payments and technology, with over 259 billion payments transactions flowing safely between consumers, merchants, financial institutions, and government entities in more than 200 countries and territories each year. Our mission is to connect the world through the most innovative, convenient, reliable, and secure payments network, enabling individuals, businesses, and economies to thrive while driven by a common purpose – to uplift everyone, everywhere by being the best way to pay and be paid.

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The Senior Director of Client Success, acting as a Lead for the Merchant business, holds a critical position within the Client Services organization, being accountable for the client experience within the Merchant segment. This is a senior leadership role, as a member of the North America Client Services Enablers, Merchants and Fintechs (EMF) leadership team.

This individual will lead a team responsible for managing post-sale and operational relationships with clients by driving client success outcomes. This role is accountable for the service delivery of new products, onboarding new clients, implementations, product adoption, operational support and client optimization.

The Senior Director is expected to provide strategic, functional, and technical leadership for all the operational activities for applicable clients, including the cross functional delivery of systems and services. The Senior Director is responsible for defining and deploying client service strategies across various merchant types and verticals, ensuring that Client operational goals and success metrics are understood and achieved.

The Senior Director is accountable for building a high-performing and cohesive team, aligned to the global Client Success strategic transformation, by providing leadership to a growing team of individual contributors. They should do this through coaching, setting strategic direction and applying working knowledge of Visa products, systems, and procedures.

The Senior Director is accountable for personifying the Visa leadership principles while providing guidance to direct reports, cross-functional staff, and senior management to proactively drive Client Success whilst ensuring effective resolution of high-priority issues with potential of significant financial implications.

This senior leadership role is an exciting opportunity to be at the forefront of and shape the Client Success transformation, by leading, growing and developing a high-performing team of Client Success Managers (CSMs) to maximize client benefits realization and value from Visa products and services via proactive optimization processes.

Responsibilities include:

• Builds a high-performing merchant vertical CSM program, including hiring staff and developing best practices for communicating with merchants, including refreshing the Merchant Digest and incident management communication processes.

• Leverages deep understanding of merchant segment to identify and address client pain points specific to merchant payments.

• Works cross-functionally to ensure CSMs have the merchant data and reporting needed to provide insights and best practices to help clients optimize their payment processes and enhance customer experiences.

• Leads CSMs in the development of strategies to help clients navigate the unique challenges of the merchant segment and specific merchant verticals, where applicable.

• Proactively develops a point of view on the latest merchant industry payments trends to lead CSMs in providing clients with cutting-edge solutions.

• Actively participates in the North America Merchant Leadership Team, representing all Client Services functions to Merchant sales leaders, focused on delivering excellent client experience and optimizing client performance on all post-sales topics in alignment with defined Client Services OKRs.

• Develops and maintains strong relationships with key Visa cross-functional stakeholders, positioning Client Success as the accountable team for all post-sale and pre-renewal activities.

• Holds cross-functional stakeholders within Client Services (e.g., Onboarding and Implementation teams) accountable for delivering a best in-class client experience across each stage of client service journey.

• Streamlines key strategic initiatives relating to our Client Success transformation, with the aim of inspiring direct reports to enact key changes in support of the future state vision.

• Provides thought-leadership on latest global payments trends, Visa solutions, and competitive insights to provide a world-class client experience.

• Fosters relationships with senior management client stakeholders by appropriately advising clients on key actions to prioritize to maximize value realization

• Acts as the central escalation point, providing support to direct reports during major incident and crisis responses as needed.

• Holds direct reports accountable for their development in line with the Visa Leadership Principles and Rewards and Recognition programs, including Quarterly/Annual Reviews.

• Owns the expense budget for NA Merchant CSM revenue targets and the tracking of OKRs based on the multi-year Client Success transformation.

• Be available for international travel approximately 20% of the time due to the regional footprint of clients, direct reports and team members.

This is a hybrid position. Expectation of days in office will be confirmed by your Hiring Manager.

Basic Qualifications:

• 12 or more years of work experience with a Bachelor’s Degree or at least 10 years of work experience with an Advanced degree (e.g. Masters/MBA /JD/MD), or a minimum of 5 years of work experience with a PhD

Preferred Qualifications

• Excellent leadership and team management skills with a track record of building and developing high-performing teams
• Demonstrated expertise in payment systems, including authorization & clearing systems, client connectivity, and settlement services.
• In-depth knowledge of merchant payment needs.
• Demonstrated expertise at strategically solving complex global cross-functional issues, evidenced by the exercise of critical thinking and sound judgment.
• Demonstrated ability to build and maintain outstanding business relationships with internal and external stakeholders at senior and executive management levels.
• Outstanding ability to strategically steer cross-functional teams through high-impact, unprecedented, complex business issues.
• Demonstrated expertise of AI concepts and applications, and how they can be leveraged to create value for Visa and its clients.
• Demonstrated expertise of leading and managing of a team of technical and/or professional services professionals.
• Expert proficiency in the following skills:
• Building client relationships: Build credibility, create trust-based relationship and partner with clients to build their business
• Becoming customer centric: Listen to and prioritize customer needs to drive value realization and build trusted partnerships
• Success planning: Build measurable actions plans to help clients achieve their business goals and realize value from their products/solutions
• Client engagement: Communicate clearly and effectively with clients
• Proactiveness: Think ahead and take action
• Critical thinking: Take ownership over problems and find creative solutions to complex problems

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.

Visa welcomes and encourages applications from persons with disabilities. Accommodations are available on request for candidates taking part in all aspects of the selection process.