Portfolio Policy and Tooling Lead- BPL

Join us as a Portfolio Policy and Tooling Lead, where you will take ownership of strategic reporting tools and drive the creation of a clear product roadmap for the new Barclaycard Payments business. You will be responsible for establishing and maintaining portfolio change standards, controls and tooling, driving best practice across the organisation. In this role, you will own and evolve portfolio reporting, delivering insights and updates to senior stakeholders to support informed decision-making. You will play a key part in shaping how the portfolio is monitored and managed, helping to drive efficiency, transparency, and strategic impact across the business.

Essential Skills/Basic Qualifications:

• Proven experience in project governance, including effective risk and issue management.

• Demonstrable experience owning and evolving strategic reporting tools or platforms, including the definition and management of product or enhancement roadmaps.

• Experience designing, implementing, and maintaining portfolio or change standards, controls, and governance frameworks to drive consistency and best practice across multiple initiatives.

• Proven experience producing and owning portfolio-level reporting and executive MI, delivering clear insights to senior stakeholders to support informed decision-making.

• Proficiency in PowerBI, Jira, and Confluence to enable effective reporting, change delivery, and collaboration across teams.

Desired Skills/Preferred Qualifications:

• Understanding of the Payments industry and/or prior experience in a FinTech environment.

• Professional project management qualifications, demonstrating formal expertise in managing projects.

You may be assessed on the key critical skills relevant for this role, such as risk and controls, change and transformation, business acumen strategic thinking and digital and technology, as well as job-specific technical skills.

This role is based in London.

Barclays’ payments acceptance business provides critical infrastructure to the UK economy, processing billions of pounds of payments annually for both small businesses and domestic and international corporate clients.

In April 2025, we announced a long-term partnership with Brookfield Asset Management to grow and transform the payments acceptance business by broadening the range of services offered, enhancing the experience for both existing and prospective clients. Leveraging extensive client relationships and deep experience of UK payments, we will create an environment of continuous innovation - activated by Brookfield’s global private equity expertise in payments, technology, operational transformation and corporate carve-outs - to ensure the business is strategically positioned for long-term growth.

Barclays will invest approximately £400m in the new business, the majority of which will be incurred during the first three years. Performance-linked incentives will drive greater alignment between the partners, underpinning the long-term commitment to the transformation. Barclays and Brookfield will work to create a standalone entity over time, continuing to use the Barclaycard Payments (BPL) brand and acting as the sole payments acceptance services provider to Barclays’ clients for a minimum of ten years. 

For more information on our partnership with Brookfield, please visit Barclays.com.

Purpose of the role

To lead the portfolio management team in the delivery of successful projects, while ensuring that portfolio management processes and practices are aligned with controls and governance standards and that projects are aligned with the organisation’s strategic objectives. 

Accountabilities

• Leading of portfolio management team, including setting of portfolio vision, management of portfolio performance, and provision of guidance and support to portfolio analysts.
• Monitoring of portfolio performance, including tracking of project progress, managing budgets, identification of thematic risks and issues, and reporting on portfolio status to senior management.
• Management of portfolio documentation, including aggregation of portfolio book of work, schedules, and budgets, and ensuring that portfolio documentation is up-to-date and accurate.
• Facilitation of portfolio governance, including ensuring that projects are aligned with the organisation’s strategic objectives, aligned with the controls and governance standards and that portfolio thematic risks and issues are managed effectively.
• Managing the portfolio Book of Work outlining the sequence and dependencies of change initiatives, considering factors like resource availability, stakeholder buy-in, and potential risks.
• Facilitation of change management activities, to ensure that change initiatives are successfully implemented and embedded in the organisation.
• Continuous improvement of portfolio management practices, including identification of areas for improvement and implementation of changes to improve portfolio performance.
• Collaboration with stakeholders, including senior management, project teams, and external partners, to ensure that portfolio management practices are aligned with their needs and expectations.
• Development of portfolio management processes that are aligned with controls and governance standards and that support the delivery of successful projects.

Assistant Vice President Expectations

• To advise and influence decision making, contribute to policy development and take responsibility for operational effectiveness. Collaborate closely with other functions/ business divisions.
• Lead a team performing complex tasks, using well developed professional knowledge and skills to deliver on work that impacts the whole business function. Set objectives and coach employees in pursuit of those objectives, appraisal of performance relative to objectives and determination of reward outcomes
• If the position has leadership responsibilities, People 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.
• OR for an individual contributor, they will lead collaborative assignments and guide team members through structured assignments, identify the need for the inclusion of other areas of specialisation to complete assignments. They will identify new directions for assignments and/ or projects, identifying a combination of cross functional methodologies or practices to meet required outcomes.
• Consult on complex issues; providing advice to People Leaders to support the resolution of escalated issues.
• Identify ways to mitigate risk and developing new policies/procedures in support of the control and governance agenda.
• Take ownership for managing risk and strengthening controls in relation to the work done.
• Perform work that is closely related to that of other areas, which requires understanding of how areas coordinate and contribute to the achievement of the objectives of the organisation sub-function.
• Collaborate with other areas of work, for business aligned support areas to keep up to speed with business activity and the business strategy.
• Engage in complex analysis of data from multiple sources of information, internal and external sources such as procedures and practises (in other areas, teams, companies, etc).to solve problems creatively and effectively.
• Communicate complex information. 'Complex' information could include sensitive information or information that is difficult to communicate because of its content or its audience.
• Influence or convince stakeholders to achieve outcomes.

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.