About Phorest

Phorest powers 11,000 hair and beauty salons using our software across the globe. Our aim is to capture 25% of the market globally – that’s one million salons and a billion-dollar company.

We are growing and would like to add a new member to our team. You will join a group of highly motivated individuals, to help us grow Phorest faster.

The Opportunity

The Payments & Risk Operations Manager is a senior, strategic, and highly accountable global leader. You work with business partners to define and execute the Payments & Risk Operations strategy, ensuring alignment with Phorest’s product, compliance, and growth goals.

You define and evolve the long-term strategic direction for Payments and Risk operating model, and drive execution through strong cross-functional and regional partnerships. You ensure global operational excellence—across both steady-state performance and step-change improvement—so payments and risk operations enable Phorest’s growth while protecting our business and customers.

Payments are core to the Phorest customer experience. You ensure payments and risk are embedded into every stage of the customer journey, working in lockstep with Global Customer Operations, Product, and R&D to shape processes, tooling, training, and regional enablement. As a thought leader to regional Leadership, you create cross-regional alignment and provide strategic guidance, mentorship, and governance.

The Payments & Risk team is small but strong and works closely with all regional PayOps teams driving improvements for the teams and our customers.  This role is an enabler and supports all of the regional teams in delivering their goals. You lead, build, and continuously evolve the global Payments & Risk operating model, optimising how we onboard, support, protect, and grow our customers’ payments capabilities. You hold teams and regions accountable for performance while coaching and influencing them to deliver a best-in-class global payments experience.

What You'll Do

• Product delivery

  Collaborate with Pay Product and Commercial to support the rollout of PhorestPay product and features through: 

  • Research into legal and regulatory requirements in region, including engagement with external advisors where needed

  • Ensure the development and continuous improvement of internal training content and external help content

  • Delivery of internal training sessions for regional CFTs

  • Researching regional asks to see if they can be enabled through Stripe without dev requirement

  
  

  Payment & Risk Partner management

  • Own the global payments partner ecosystem strategy, including partner selection, contract negotiation, operational governance, and performance management

  • Mitigate loss of revenue through developing a scalable risk operations function

  • Establish the governance model for incident management ensuring rapid cross functional response and prevention, managing incidents and service degradations.

  
  

  Efficiency & Process Optimisation

  • Establish, communicate and continuously evolve the global Payments & Risk Operations Strategic Vision, ensuring it aligns with Phorest objectives and is translated into regional plans and outcomes.

  • Co-own the end-to-end customer journey perspective for payments with Global Customer Operations, ensuring Customer Ops processes (support, onboarding, education, migrations, complex activations) always account for payments and risk requirements.

  • Continuously identify, assess and optimise cross-journey processes (support, onboarding, education, and data migrations) with the lens of payments

  • Own automation and process optimisation initiatives, ensuring workflows reduce friction and improve service delivery, enabled by the Business Systems team. Track and report measurable improvements

  
  

  Cross-Departmental-Region Collaboration

  • Partner deeply with the Global Head of Customer Operations and their domain leads to embed payments/risk into global CX operating systems, including planning cycles, VoC rhythms, enablement content, and regional health reviews.

  • You Lead global payment operations strategies, setting the standards, governance and expectations for regional execution while tailoring strategies to regional needs, taking into account cultural, regulatory, and market-specific challenges to ensure both global consistency and local effectiveness.

  • You ensure alignment by collaborating with global departments (especially RnD) to ensure systems are aligned with the needs of Payments Operations.

  • Work closely with Regional Teams to ensure the Payops processes are effectively helping them achieve their outcomes and meet their goals.

  
  

  Data & Insights Management

  • Use data-driven insights to inform operational decisions and strategies, providing regional teams with actionable insights to enhance payments interactions.

  • Drive data integrity, elevate risk visibility, and optimise commercial impact analysis globally by guaranteeing accurate, accessible payment data at every stage of the customer journey.

  
  

  Performance Tracking & Reporting

  • You are accountable for tracking  and reporting on key steady-state operational metrics for payments operations, such as;

    • Merchant Onboarding & Adoption - Time to First Transaction (TTFT), Attach Rate

    • Fraud & Risk - Chargeback Rate, Fraud Rate

    • Operational Efficiency - Payment Processing Success Rate, Automated Workflows Adoption

    • Voice of the Customer - understand payment related VoC feedback and plan to resolve top issues

  • Share insights across all regions to support them in reviewing performance data to identify areas for improvement and implement solutions to address operational bottlenecks or challenges.

  
  

  Strategic Initiatives, Continuous Improvement & Staying Ahead

  • Lead and execute initiatives aimed at enhancing the payment experience, focusing on reducing reactive problem-solving and driving proactive service delivery.

  • Stay ahead of industry trends in Fintech, tools and automation technologies, leading initiatives that continuously improve operational efficiency and global payments experience.  These initiatives will shape the future of payments at Phorest, driving advances in our payments strategy.

  
  

  People & Leadership 

  • Manage a small team of highly skilled payment operations professionals with deep expertise in areas such as risk and fraud. While not directly managing regional payments teams, you lead through partnerships and enablement -  by setting global operating frameworks and partnering with teams to deliver.. Their success is your success. 

  • Talent Development:  Lead, coach and develop high-performing, results-driven people highly specialised in payment operations areas. Ensure regular feedback, performance reviews, and career conversations are happening to champion our culture of growing our own timber, nurturing a culture of innovation and continuous improvement..  

  • Set team and individual measurable goals for your people, and with regional teams, ensuring expectations are clear and we regularly evaluate progress.

  • A culture ambassador for the team through creating and nurturing a collaborative culture with a shared purpose. Build and maintain a positive high trust team environment.

  • Act as a senior sponsor for change initiatives across the payments ecosystem, ensuring alignment, clear communication, and strong adoption across global teams and senior stakeholders. Lead through change with a positive, agile mindset that fosters growth, and consistently communicate the ‘why’ behind changes, projects, and initiatives to build understanding and engagement.

What You'll Bring

• 10+ years in payments, fintech, risk, or global operations, including people leadership experience.

• Deep expertise in payments processing, merchant acquiring, payouts, fraud/chargebacks, and compliance across multiple regions.

• Proven ability to design and scale global operating models, processes, and automation.

• Strong understanding of payments partners (e.g., Stripe) and the commercial, technical, and operational dynamics of PSP ecosystems.

• Highly data-driven with strong analytical and KPI design skills, experienced in using insights to drive decisions and outcomes.

• Solid financial acumen, including cost of acceptance, loss forecasting, and revenue/retention impact of payments.

• Strategic, systems-level thinker with strong executive presence—able to set long-term direction, build scalable frameworks, and influence senior leaders without authority, and make balanced, values-led decisions that align risk, customer experience, and commercial outcomes.

• Experienced leader of specialists who builds capability, develops future leaders, and drives high performance through clear expectations, coaching, and continuous improvement.

• Exceptional collaborator who aligns and uplifts regional teams through influence, strong relationships, and open, values-led communication.
  

Benefits

🧘Your wellbeing is important to us - we provide private healthcare, 2 Wellness Days, an employee assistance program and a free online GP service.

💰As part of our Financial Wellbeing, we provide competitive Compensation, an Employee Share Purchase Scheme, Pension, Life Assurance, and Income Protection.

🚵🏿  We help you travel by providing a bike to work scheme as well as tax saver transport tickets. 

🦸‍♀️We support the women who work in Phorest by offering 2 weeks leave for Fertility Treatment, Pregnancy Loss and Menopause.

🍼We care for your family and provide Enhanced Maternity and Paternity Benefits. 

🌳We grow our own timber! We provide a great learning environment and extensive development opportunities. We run development programs and provide access to many online resources including LinkedIn learning.

🏠Moving house? Phorest employees get 3 moving days.

Phorest is an equal opportunity employer. For this position, flexi-time and working from home is possible. We are also open to remote work. Get in touch to ask for more information or to chat about your future with Phorest!

Research shows that while men apply to jobs when they meet an average of 60% of the criteria, women and other marginalised folks tend to only apply when they check every box. So if you think you have what it takes, but don't necessarily meet every single point on the job description, please still get in touch. We'd love to have a chat and see if you could be a great fit.