Head of payments

About the Role

As our Head of Payments, you will own payment performance end-to-end, with a strong focus on authorization rates, recurring payments, transaction routing, chargebacks, compliance, and payment costs. This is a highly hands-on role with a significant focus on the US payments ecosystem. You’ll work directly with payment data, PSPs, acquirers, and internal teams to identify opportunities, solve performance issues, and drive measurable improvements across the payment lifecycle.

At Acentecom, we believe that a strong payments ecosystem is essential to creating seamless customer experiences and enabling sustainable growth. We’re looking for someone who understands the details behind payment performance and can turn that expertise into measurable business impact.

What You’ll Own

• Own and continuously improve front-end authorization rates, identifying decline patterns and opportunities to increase successful initial transactions.
• Own and continuously improve recurring and subscription authorization rates, optimizing retries, dunning, timing, and recovery strategies to maximize successful rebills.
• Own transaction routing and cascading, continuously optimizing how transactions are routed across the payments ecosystem to improve approval performance and resilience.
• Own chargeback performance and card-network monitoring, including VAMP and other Visa and Mastercard requirements, ensuring risk metrics remain within healthy thresholds.
• Drive payment cost optimization, understanding the economics behind processing and working directly with PSPs and acquirers to optimize pricing, fees, and commercial terms.
• Use payment data to diagnose issues and identify opportunities, translating decline codes, authorization trends, dispute data, and provider performance into concrete actions.
• Partner directly with PSPs, acquirers, card networks, and internal teams to resolve payment issues and continuously improve performance.

What you Bring

• Strong hands-on payments experience within high-volume e-commerce, subscription, DTC, or a similarly complex consumer business.
• Deep experience with the US payments ecosystem, including payment processing, acquiring, authorization behavior, card networks, and recurring payments.
• Proven ownership of initial and recurring authorization rates, with experience identifying and implementing changes that materially improve payment performance.
• Strong hands-on experience with MIDs, PSPs, acquirers, transaction routing, cascading, retries, and dunning optimization.
• Deep understanding of chargebacks, disputes, fraud, and card-network monitoring programs, including VAMP and Visa/Mastercard thresholds.
• Strong commercial understanding of payments, including processing costs, pricing models, provider fees, and PSP/acquirer negotiations.
• Strong analytical skills and the ability to work directly with payment data, dashboards, decline codes, approval trends, and dispute metrics to identify problems and drive solutions.
• A highly proactive, ownership-driven approach. You’re comfortable getting into the details, solving problems directly, and taking accountability for payment performance rather than operating only at a strategic level.
• Strong communication and cross-functional skills, with the ability to work effectively with Engineering, Finance, Customer Support, and external payment partners.