Manager, Payments/Scheme Economics

Job Title: Manager, Payments/Scheme Economics

Location: London, United Kingdom

Job Type: Full-time

About Airwallex

Airwallex is the AI-native financial operating system for a real-time, intelligent economy. More than 675,000 businesses use us to run their financial operations.

How You'll Make Impact

You'll help Airwallex manage and improve the economics of card payments, focusing on scheme fees and interchange across Visa and Mastercard. You'll turn complex network rules and payment data into accurate configurations, actionable analysis, and decisions that improve cost visibility and margin performance.

Key Responsibilities:

• Own payment-cost analysis across scheme fees, interchange, and network rules, identifying changes and translating them into clear financial, product, and operational requirements.
• Maintain accurate fee tables, eligibility criteria, and transaction-level logic with Product and Engineering, ensuring payment-cost calculations and customer billing reflect current network rules.
• Build models and reporting across markets, products, payment methods, and transaction types to identify margin drivers, anomalies, leakage, and opportunities to improve payment economics.
• Support cost and margin optimisation through transaction qualification, BIN routing, cost configuration, and related levers, contributing to pricing, product design, market launches, and commercial decisions.
• Strengthen governance, testing, reconciliation, and controls by comparing expected costs with actual network charges and helping drive root-cause resolution.
• Partner with Finance, Product, Engineering, Data, Operations, and external payment partners to resolve scheme pricing, interchange, and rule-related questions.

What We're Looking For

Essentials

• Experience in payments, acquiring, issuing, card networks, payment infrastructure, or a related role, ideally within a global PSP, acquirer, scheme, issuer, or fintech.
• Strong knowledge of card payment economics, particularly Visa and Mastercard interchange, scheme fees, transaction qualification, and network rules.
• Experience translating complex payment rules, fee schedules, or network requirements into system logic, configurations, and controls.
• Experience working with payment-cost systems or controls, including interchange tables, scheme fee logic, BIN-based rules, transaction attributes, or similar payment configurations.
• Strong analytical and quantitative capabilities, including experience working with transaction-level data, economic modelling, and reconciliation of expected versus actual payment costs.
• Commercial judgment and the ability to connect payment mechanics to pricing, product decisions, and margin optimisation.
• Exceptional attention to detail and ownership, with the discipline required to manage complex rules where small errors can create meaningful financial impact at scale.
• Strong cross-functional execution, with the ability to work effectively across Product, Engineering, Finance, Data, Operations, and external payment partners.

Preferred

• Experience partnering directly with Visa, Mastercard, or other payment networks.
• Experience applying AI or advanced analytics to rule interpretation, anomaly detection, or payment-cost optimisation.

Benefits and Perks

No specific benefits mentioned.

Equal Opportunity

Airwallex is an equal opportunity employer, valuing diversity and considering candidates based on merit, qualifications, competence, and talent.