Director - Merchant Onboarding and Integration - BPL

Role Purpose

The Director, Merchant Onboarding is accountable for establishing and leading a centralised, end-to-end merchant onboarding function across Barclays Acquiring. The role owns the design, build, and ongoing performance of the onboarding operating model, ensuring merchants are onboarded efficiently, compliantly, and with a consistently high-quality experience that accelerates time-to-revenue.

The role will consolidate onboarding-related capabilities where appropriate (including Professional Services), act as the single point of accountability for onboarding outcomes, and serve as the primary business interface with Product and Technology teams to drive onboarding priorities.

Accountabilities

Strategy & Operating Model

• Define and own the end-to-end merchant onboarding operating model, from contract signature through to live trading and early lifecycle support.
• Identify onboarding activities currently distributed across the organisation and recommend consolidation into a centralised onboarding function.
• Establish clear ownership, governance, service levels, and escalation paths across the onboarding journey.

Organisation Design & Leadership

• Design, build, and lead the merchant onboarding organisation, including role design, skills, capacity, and sourcing strategy (internal and external).
• Create a strong leadership team and culture focused on delivery excellence, accountability, and continuous improvement.
• Define and maintain clear engagement models with Sales, Risk, Compliance, Operations, Product, and Technology.

Delivery & Operational Performance

• Own onboarding delivery performance across all merchant segments, ensuring consistent execution against agreed SLAs.
• Drive improvements in onboarding cycle times, quality, and predictability.
• Ensure onboarding processes are robust, scalable, and compliant with regulatory and control requirements.

Product & Technology Partnership

• Act as the single senior business owner for onboarding capabilities with Product and Technology teams.
• Define onboarding requirements, priorities, and success measures to inform product roadmaps and technology delivery.
• Champion automation and tooling to reduce manual effort and improve merchant and colleague experience.

Commercial & Revenue Enablement

• Partner closely with the Chief Revenue Officer and commercial teams to ensure onboarding supports sales velocity and revenue realisation.
• Provide transparency on onboarding capacity, constraints, and risks impacting pipeline conversion.

Purpose of the role

To manage the people, processes and technologies in the IT function to ensure they deliver outcomes that support the goals of the business.  

Accountabilities

• Development and implementation of technology strategies, ensuring technology investments are enablers for business success – i.e. improve efficiency, support growth, innovation, and risk management.
• Strategic leadership to the business on all technology matters, working with subject matter experts across the Group Technology organisation, such as infrastructure, service management and architecture.  .
• Alignment to global data governance frameworks to ensure data quality, security, and privacy, encouraging data-driven decision making by leveraging data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) to extract insights and inform business strategies.
• Implementation of technology practices according to security, compliance and regulatory requirements, and is kept current. Implementation of work in accordance with policies and controls and are actively managing risks.  .
• Digital transformation/change projects, programmes and initiatives, modernising legacy systems new and enhanced digital solutions to enable customers, clients and colleagues.   .
• Management of the technology team includes hiring, training, mentoring, and setting and achieving team goals and ensuring that the technology team have the resources and support they need to be successful.
• Management of the technology budgets, ensuring appropriate prioritisation of resources, ensuring investments in technology support overall business goals, and that costs are optimised, and efficiencies are delivered, where required, ensuring financial risks associated with technology are mitigated.

Director Expectations

• 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.