Senior Payments Consultant

Senior Payments Consultant Location: London, UK We are recruiting on behalf of a payments business for a Senior Payments Consultant with strong technical knowledge, analytical skills and commercial judgement. In this client-facing role, you will help businesses understand how their payments are performing, identify opportunities to improve acceptance and reduce costs, and build evidence-based recommendations. You will need to be comfortable working with detailed transaction data and explaining your findings to senior decision-makers. Key responsibilities Assess payment performance

• Lead client discussions to understand their payment arrangements, commercial priorities and operational challenges.
• Analyse transaction data, merchant statements and processing costs to establish a clear picture of current performance.
• Review acquiring arrangements, interchange and scheme fees, payment methods, authentication and foreign exchange costs.
• Compare performance with relevant market benchmarks and identify areas requiring further investigation. Identify and evaluate improvements
• Investigate authorisation rates and decline patterns to identify opportunities to increase successful payments.
• Assess opportunities to optimise payment fees, improve authentication outcomes and reduce avoidable costs.
• Quantify the potential impact of proposed changes, distinguishing realistic improvements from unsupported assumptions.
• Prioritise recommendations according to their commercial value and practical feasibility. Build business cases
• Develop financial and return-on-investment models using client data.
• Clearly document assumptions, calculations and dependencies.
• Translate complex analysis into business cases and practical improvement roadmaps.
• Explain and defend your findings when challenged by client finance, technology or treasury teams. Manage client engagement
• Present findings and recommendations to senior stakeholders, including finance and technology leaders.
• Work with client teams to validate the analysis before recommendations are finalised.
• Act as a subject matter expert throughout consulting engagements.
• Contribute insights to internal benchmarking resources and help improve consulting approaches. Experience and skills
• Substantial experience in payments consulting, payments strategy, acquiring, payment service providers or payment cost optimisation, ideally six years or more.
• Detailed knowledge of interchange, scheme fees and the commercial factors affecting payment costs.
• A strong understanding of authorisation processes, transaction declines and payment authentication, including 3DS and Strong Customer Authentication.
• Hands-on experience analysing transaction-level data and merchant statements.
• A track record of building robust financial models and explaining the assumptions behind them.
• Confidence presenting complex findings to senior clients and answering detailed questions.
• Strong analytical thinking, commercial judgement and attention to detail.
• The ability to turn technical findings into clear, practical recommendations. Experience with high-volume online payments, payment benchmarking or foreign exchange cost analysis would be particularly useful.