Sr. Director – Global Business Optimization – North America

Job Summary

The Global Business Optimization team has a simple mission: we turn massive amounts of data into actionable insights that drive value through improved authorization and payment success rates. Our analytic consultants and data analysts work with Visa’s clients and staff to improve portfolio performance, program profitability and cardholder experiences around the world. By coupling in-depth analysis of portfolio behavior with Visa’s world-class products, digital offerings and marketing capabilities, we ensure our clients’ programs operate at their peak potential and that cardholders have seamless commerce experiences in both the physical and digital world.

As part of the Client Services organization, this senior leadership role is essential to setting our regional strategy and delivering the promise of the Visa brand to our clients. You will use strong analytic and leadership skills, contextual business sense and a creative flair to solve real world business challenges for Visa issuing banks, acquirers, processors and merchants. Your expertise will influence the strategic direction on how Visa delivers value from our data assets in tangible ways. Role dual reports to the Global Head of Business Optimization and CS SVP in NA.

Responsibilities

The NA Head of Global Business Optimization leads our regional strategy to measure and improve client performance, building and leading a holistic function which delivers data-driven insights to external and internal executive stakeholders. Through collaboration with our client facing teams and functional executives, you will craft and execute our data analytics and insight delivery strategy to ensure a seamless client experience that delivers mutual, tangible value to Visa and our clients. You must be exceptional in front of executives and decision makers with the ability to lead and influence strategic initiatives and planning. Leadership talent – strategic, direct, and matrixed – is essential. Specific responsibilities include:

• Lead the overall operational analytics strategy for the region, spearheading engagement models, overall client delivery experience, prioritization of strategic initiatives and staffing models.
• Build and lead a team capable of driving tangible performance opportunities with both rigorous depth and appropriate scalability for a large set of clients (issuers, acquirers, processors and merchants) on authorizations, risk, merchant engagement and digital products.
• Foster a high performing culture within your team that becomes the benchmark for excellence at Visa; develop talent from within as well as recruit talent that can inject new perspectives, skill sets and experience.
• Compare client performance against industry best practices with a shrewd eye toward identifying performance and/or profitability improvement opportunities – not just potential, but actionable recommendations that drive tangible value for both our clients and Visa.
• Craft meaningful insights from complex data with content that clearly presents opportunities in an accurate, understandable and engaging manner; ensure data driven decision making is a priority for external Visa clients, colleagues, and other internal stakeholders.
• Identify macro business and market trends that guide areas of future analysis to the mutual benefit of Visa and our clients.
• Develop a deep understanding of Visa’s products and services and how they are most effectively utilized; translate that knowledge into client engagement strategies that yield financial and performance benefits.
• Serve as a strategic advisor to organizational leadership and peers – inclusive of regional Client Services SVP, regional functional VPs and the Regional President – in order to mature our analytic capabilities and delivery effectiveness.
• Cultivate deep partnerships with regional leaders in CS and other functional disciplines, building relationship capital that facilitates the advancement of strategic, cross-functional initiatives.
• Be an expert at getting to the root of a problem, defining business objectives and formalizing data requirements – especially in a fast paced, fluid environment.
• Direct strategy on combining and analyzing disparate data sources and deriving insight in a Big Data environment with multiple data sources and tools.
• Exceptional business acumen and technical rigor – be able to seamlessly shift between conversations with executives and technical staff.

Basic Qualifications

• 12 years of work experience with a Bachelor’s Degree; 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

This position demands an energetic, analytic business executive with demonstrated thought leadership on building and sustaining an operational performance and/or client engagement function. Deep expertise in payments, analytics, business consulting or operational excellence is highly desirable.

• Professionally qualified, including:
  • A minimum of 15 years of success in progressively responsible roles
  • 10+ years working in analytics, management consulting, strategic operations or insight delivery
  • 7+ years of leadership or management experience
• Possess a relentless client-centric, result-driven mindset coupled with strong problems solving skills and an ability to break down complex problems and propose alternative, new ways of thinking
• Be a transformative leader with executive presence and experience – inspire others to a new level of excellence, both in and outside of your organization, at all levels of seniority
• Expertise in delivering data insights, strategic planning, authorizations and analytic straetgy is highly desireable
• Extensive experience in the banking of financial services sector with Visa experience or knowledge of the payments industrty is highly desirable
• P&L ownership or similar quantitative business responsibility for financial or operational performance.
• High level understanding of manipulating data from a variety of sources – big data experience (Hadoop, Hive, Spark), data visualization experience (Tableau, PowerBI) and/or SQL experience are important
• Strong verbal, written, motivation and interpersonal skills are required.
• A 4 year college degree in a quantitative field. Advanced quantitative or business degrees are highly desirable

Additional Information

Work hours: 8 hours – Regular Office hours

Travel: Position might require occasional travel for training or team meetings

Mental/Physical Requirements:

This position will be performed in an office setting. The position will require the incumbent to sit and stand at a desk, communicate in person and by telephone, frequently operate standard office equipment, such as telephones and computers, and reach with hands and arms.

EEO Statement

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.

This position does not support sponsorship.

All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.