Director – Asia Pacific Settlement Operations

Our Purpose

Mastercard powers economies and empowers people in 200+ countries and territories worldwide. Together with our customers, we're helping build a sustainable economy where everyone can prosper. We support a wide range of digital payments choices, making transactions secure, simple, smart and accessible. Our technology and innovation, partnerships and networks combine to deliver a unique set of products and services that help people, businesses and governments realize their greatest potential.

Title and Summary

Director – Asia Pacific Settlement OperationsOverview

Mastercard is a global technology company in the payments industry. Our mission is to connect and power an inclusive, digital economy that benefits everyone, everywhere by making transactions safe, simple, smart, and accessible. Using secure data and networks, partnerships and passion, our innovations and solutions help individuals, financial institutions, governments, and businesses realize their greatest potential.

Our decency quotient, or DQ, drives our culture and everything we do inside and outside of our company. With connections across more than 210 countries and territories, we are building a sustainable world that unlocks priceless possibilities for all.

The Treasury function at Mastercard is responsible for safeguarding and optimizing the company's financial resources globally. Within Treasury, the Global Settlement Services team manages the movement of funds related to Mastercard transactions, maintains relationships with commercial and central settlement bank partners, engages with regulatory bodies and ensures operational excellence across all settlement activities. The team facilitates settlement of ~$25 billion daily activity in 80+ currencies via round the clock support in India, Poland and USA.

This Director – Asia Pacific Settlement Operations role in Global Settlement Services focuses on supporting settlement operations and contingency management for Asia Pacific (AP). The director will lead initiatives for timely, secure, and efficient market settlements.

Role:

• Lead a team of Manager and Analysts based in India in managing day-to-day settlement operations, ensuring timely and accurate execution of daily payments.
• Ensure timely remediation of operational issues in accordance with established SLA's or business guidelines, and escalate as appropriate.
• Engage with upstream and downstream process owners in Clearing and Technology teams during operational issues to support resolution and execution of settlements basis established contingency plans.
• Engage with settlement bank partners in AP to ensure efficient settlement operations processes with documented contingency communication protocols exist and are tested periodically.
• Collaborate with counterparts, based in Europe and Americas, in rostering team members to support the weekend settlements process. In the event of business contingency scenarios, Director may be required to step in and support the team.
• Partner with Settlement Strategy team for operational implementation of new settlement services or enhancements in settlements in AP region.
• Lead AP liquidity roadmap by driving initiatives to ensure optimal Settlement liquidity protocol is in place across AP markets. Implement liquidity solutions in coordination with Settlement Operations and Mastercard's settlement bank partners.
• Lead global settlement invoice processing, including onboarding new vendors, routing invoices for approvals and payment via Oracle, and resolving processing exceptions.
• Oversee settlement-related bank account administration, including signatory updates, account closures, ongoing KYC reviews, and annual account validations, in partnership with GBSC.

This role leads a team that starts working at early-morning India time driven by business requirements of settlements for far-east Asia markets, including Australia and NZ. This Director role would require incumbent who is flexible and prompt to start working at India early-morning hours/ Far East Asia hours/shift aligned to support the team and market operations in Asia Pacific markets, including Australia, NZ and Japan, as per business requirements and priorities.

All About You:

• Educational qualification: MBA or Chartered Accountant; Professional qualifications like CTP, CFP preferred.
• Advanced level of expertise in Treasury settlements / payment operations and banking infrastructure gained through experiences in multinational corporates' Regional/Global Treasury centres, financial institutions or banks.
• Proven track record of leading regional or global operations in a time-sensitive environment. Must enjoy leading daily critical operations in payments domain with non-negotiable banking cut-offs.
• Strong team leadership experience of an operations team.
• Proficient in payment network systems, including authorization, clearing, and settlement, and bank connectivity solutions like H2H and SWIFT.
• Demonstrated ability in leading high-impact transformation initiatives with strong project management and stakeholder management skills across global and cross-functional teams.
• Team player with proven team leadership and relationship skills.
• Effective communication skills and experience of presenting complex topics (preferably in Treasury and banking domain) to senior management.
• Excellent negotiation skills and experience in managing complex banking relationships.
• To meet the demands of a global organization with 24/7 operations the candidate must be flexible to support management tasks that occur outside standard business hours

Corporate Security Responsibility

All activities involving access to Mastercard assets, information, and networks comes with an inherent risk to the organization and, therefore, it is expected that every person working for, or on behalf of, Mastercard is responsible for information security and must:

• Abide by Mastercard's security policies and practices;
• Ensure the confidentiality and integrity of the information being accessed;
• Report any suspected information security violation or breach, and
• Complete all periodic mandatory security trainings in accordance with Mastercard's guidelines.