Director, Head of Domestic Payments

Purpose of the Role
As Director Domestic Payments, you lead the end-to-end strategy, delivery, and performance of Barclays UK’s domestic retail payment products and services. This includes Faster Payments, BACS, Cheques, Current Account Switching, and overlays like Confirmation of Payee. Your remit spans product design, customer and colleague journeys, scheme relationships, and regulatory engagement—ensuring payments are secure, commercially sustainable, and deliver seamless, trusted experiences that strengthen customer engagement and loyalty.

Reporting directly to the MD, Head of Payments, you play a pivotal role in shaping the future of domestic payments at Barclays UK. You collaborate closely with the Director of Open Banking and the Director of International & High Value Payments, fostering alignment across Retail, Digital, Risk, and Technology to position Payments as a strategic enabler of growth.

Key Responsibilities [key criteria]
Product Leadership & Strategy

• Own the 3–5 year roadmap for domestic payments, aligned to Barclays UK’s transformation agenda.
• Drive innovation, uplifting existing payment journeys with compelling new customer features.
• Lead Barclays UK’s response to industry initiatives such as tokenised deposits, the National Payments Vision, and emerging regulatory programmes.
• Lead through the product lifecycle, ensuring commercial viability, regulatory compliance, and operational resilience.
• Shape Barclays UK’s position in industry-wide transformation programmes

Customer & Colleague Journeys

• Oversee journey optimisation and feature development across digital and assisted channels, improving NPS and reducing complaints.
• Embed controls and governance across journeys, including incident management, remediation, and regulatory reporting.

Commercial & Scheme Management

• Manage P&L performance, pricing strategy, and scheme relationships.
• Represent Barclays in industry forums and regulatory bodies, influencing market direction and ensuring readiness for future disruption.
• Lead Barclays UK’s response to domestic regulatory change, including PSR consultations, Pay.UK roadmap, and Bank of England initiatives.
• Risk & Resilience
• Accountable for Domestic Payments Important Business Service (IBS), leading contingency planning and resilience testing with the Bank of England and Pay.UK.
• Champion robust risk management practices, including product reviews, RCSA, and scheme attestations.

Leadership & Culture

• Build and lead a high-performing, inclusive team across the UK and India.
• Foster a culture of collaboration, experimentation, and continuous improvement through initiatives like the Payments Journey Lab and ‘Consistently Excellent’ workshops

Delivery

• Partner with technology counterparts from initial requirements through to final delivery, ensuring payments change is delivered safely, on budget, and with strong customer outcomes.

Key Competencies

• Strategic Thinking – Aligning payments with broader BUK priorities, especially in Mass Affluent and Youth segments.
• Stakeholder Management – Influencing across BUK, BX, CIB, and external partners.
• Market & Industry Knowledge – Staying ahead of trends, competition, and regulation.
• Customer Focus – Designing experiences that meet real needs and drive satisfaction.
• Commerciality – Balancing customer value with sustainable business outcomes.
• Digital Transformation – Embedding payments into digital journeys and enabling future-ready propositions.
• Risk Management – Embedding controls and resilience across all touchpoints.
• Analytical Thinking – Using data to inform decisions and drive performance.
• Product Design Lifecycle – Applying agile and customer-centric methodologies.
• Product Design Lifecycle – Applying agile and customer-centric methodologies.

Decision-Making & Impact

• You act as a confident decision-maker, using data and judgement to balance customer, commercial, and regulatory outcomes. You empower your team to take ownership, share lessons learned, and continuously improve. Your decisions shape the future of payments at Barclays—driving measurable improvements in customer satisfaction (NPS), operational resilience, and P&L performance.

Purpose of the role

To manage and develop existing and new products and/or services; and where applicable, ownership of related customer and colleague journeys, develops the product strategy, drive change through Barclays execution teams, make key decisions in the product lifecycle and own associated outcomes for customers, colleagues and the bank, achieved through appropriate service level agreements, regulatory compliance, risk management and controls. 

Accountabilities

• Development of customer level strategies & solutions that are tailored to customers’ needs.
• Subject Matter Expert in the applicable Product/Proposition team and be able to confidently guide and advise stakeholders at all levels in the Bank on the application of existing and new products/propositions and related customer and colleague journeys.
• Development of product propositions, and/or service strategy, define the priorities for delivering the outcomes needed to deliver the strategy and lead execution of the priorities.
• Development of different commercial and business models through a strong understanding of the financial drivers of the P&L for the relevant segment/ proposition/ journey.
• Evaluation of the technical feasibility, legal compliance, and potential risks associated with the development and launch of the new product.
• Monitoring of market trends and analysis feedback from internal employees and target customers through prototypes, user testing sessions, and beta programs to identify areas for improvement to refine the product / process before launch.
• Management of comprehensive launch plans and technical deployments for products that establish rollout timelines, marketing strategies, training initiatives and communication channels to promote the launch new products effectively.
• Monitoring of key metrics such as adoption rates, usage patterns, customer satisfaction (including complaints), and revenue generation to assess the product's performance against set goals.

Director Expectations

• To manage a business function, providing significant input to function wide strategic initiatives. Contribute to and influence policy and procedures for the function and plan, manage and consult on multiple complex and critical strategic projects, which may be business wide..
• They manage the direction of a large team or sub-function, leading other people managers and embedding a performance culture aligned to the values of the business. Or for an individual contributor, they lead organisation wide projects and act as deep technical expert and thought leader, identifying new ways of working and collaborating cross functionally. They will train, guide and coach less experienced specialists and provide information affecting long term profits, organisational risks and strategic decisions..
• Provide expert advice to senior functional management and committees to influence decisions made outside of own function, offering significant input to function wide strategic initiatives.
• Manage, coordinate and enable resourcing, budgeting and policy creation for a significant sub-function.
• Escalates breaches of policies / procedure appropriately.
• Foster and guide compliance, ensure regulations are observed that relevant processes in place to facilitate adherence.
• Focus on the external environment, regulators, or advocacy groups to both monitor and influence on behalf of Barclays, when appropriate.
• Demonstrate extensive knowledge of how the function integrates with the business division / Group to achieve the overall business objectives.
• Maintain broad and comprehensive knowledge of industry theories and practices within own discipline alongside up-to-date relevant sector / functional knowledge, and insight into external market developments / initiatives.
• Use interpretative thinking and advanced analytical skills to solve problems and design solutions in often complex/ sensitive situations.
• Exercise management authority to make significant decisions and certain strategic decisions or recommendations within own area.
• Negotiate with and influence stakeholders at a senior level both internally and externally.
• Act as principal contact point for key clients and counterparts in other functions/ businesses divisions.
• Mandated as a spokesperson for the function and business division.

All Senior Leaders are expected to demonstrate a clear set of leadership behaviours to create an environment for colleagues to thrive and deliver to a consistently excellent standard. The four LEAD behaviours are: L – Listen and be authentic, E – Energise and inspire, A – Align across the enterprise, D – Develop others.

All colleagues will be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Values of Respect, Integrity, Service, Excellence and Stewardship – our moral compass, helping us do what we believe is right. They will also be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Mindset – to Empower, Challenge and Drive – the operating manual for how we behave.