Payments Implementation Specialist

**Overview**

We are looking for an experienced payments person, with skills in implementing payment solutions in South Africa. This is a 12-month contract opportunity, based in Johannesburg

**Project scope**: Drive sales and implementation of a new payment solutions in South Africa.

**Primary Role**
- Partner with hiring organisations internal business and product teams to understand the product (payments solution), its merits for both the organization and the target clients.
- In conjunction with internal business and product teams, identify target clients who would benefit from the solution and formulate a priority list of targets.
- Formulate a high-level business case for target clients to understand the potential impact of the solution.
- Design and lead the Go to Market of the payment solution.
- Create a generic/baseline implementation roadmap to be used for target clients, catering for, people, process, and technology impacts, including customer set-up, onboarding, data migration, certificate exchange, etc.
- Understand target clients organisation and technical integration requirements and adapt the generic implementation roadmap to be more client specific and to enable a successful roll-out.
- Provide Project Management Support to clients, to execute the implementation plan and deployment of solution into PROD.
- Pass on any client feedback to internal business and product teams that may support or improve the solution design, need for additional support, risks, and other opportunities which the hiring organisation could support clients with.
- Facilitate knowledge transfer of product features and benefits and provide input to training material to be documented by the clients Learning and Development Teams to facilitate understanding of the new payments solution across the relevant client facing and back-office teams.
- Project success will be defined as having onboarded 3 clients who are live with the solution and having collectively uploaded 21million alias records and performed over 10million lookups by the end of one year.

**Secondary Role**
- Establish project governance for all client engagements.
- Manage and monitor project schedules, risks and ensure timely resolution of any issues or deviations from project plans.
- Coordinate and facilitate multi-client project meetings and project status reports with the hiring organisation and other stakeholders to ensure timely execution of activities.
- Ensure project documentation is up-to-date, complete, and accessible to all stakeholders.
- Communicate project progress and risks to stakeholders, including senior management through monthly steering committees.
- Build and maintain relationships with project vendors and workstream owners, ensuring their work is aligned with project objectives and deliverables.
- Ensure project deliverables meet the required quality standards, including conducting final quality reviews and sign-off from the client.

**Requirements, Experience and Skills**

Bachelor's degree in a related field (e.g., business, technology, project management)

**5+ years of experience in implementing payments projects at Banks in South Africa.**
- Extensive experience working on payment products in SA region.
- Strong knowledge of South African payments landscape, payment rails, Card, EFT, Real Time Payments and PayShap.
- Proven Project Management experience implementing payment related projects within South African Banks.
- Excellent leadership, communication, and interpersonal skills, with the ability to build and maintain relationships with stakeholders.
- Strong problem-solving & analytical skills, with the ability to identify & manage project risks.
- Experience managing schedules and resources, with a focus on delivering projects on time to the required quality standards.