Data Governance Lead - Transactional banking

The Data Governance Lead is responsible for embedding robust, scalable data governance practices across Payment and Transaction Banking platforms. The role works closely with delivery, architecture and business teams to ensure data standards, models, lineage, quality, privacy and controls are consistently applied across modern payment ecosystems. This position plays a critical role in enabling regulatory-ready, audit-ready and analytics-ready data foundations within large-scale, agile delivery environments.

• Embed data governance guardrails into agile delivery life cycles, including feature design, acceptance criteria and release planning.
• Act as a domain data governance SME supporting multiple delivery teams working on Payment platforms and data products.
• Translate enterprise data governance policies into actionable, domain-specific implementation guidance for delivery teams.
• Define and maintain domain-level canonical and conceptual data models for Payment and Transaction Banking.
• Ensure consistent application of Payment data standards across platforms covering clearing, settlement, liquidity, reconciliation and reporting.
• Support semantic consistency aligned to ISO 20022 and modern Payment data models.
• Drive consistent metadata capture, ownership definition and end-to-end lineage across Payment data pipelines.
• Ensure critical datasets have clear business definitions, ownership and traceability from source systems to downstream consumption.
• Partner with technology teams to embed lineage and metadata tagging within automated delivery pipelines.

• Define domain-specific data quality rules and controls aligned to regulatory, risk and operational requirements.
• Ensure automated data quality checks are embedded into Payment data pipelines and platforms.
• Contribute to Definition of Done and acceptance criteria to ensure data quality and control requirements are met before release.

• Oversee classification, labelling and handling of sensitive and customer data within Payment datasets.
• Ensure compliance with data privacy regulations and internal control standards.
• Define and enforce data archival and retention policies for Payment data, supporting audit, regulatory and operational needs.

• Analyze audit findings and control feedback to identify governance gaps and improvement opportunities.
• Strengthen domain-level governance, quality and control frameworks based on audit and regulatory outcomes.

• Strong domain experience in Payment / Transaction Banking, including exposure to payment rails such as real-time Payment, ACH, SWIFT, clearing and settlement.
• Hands-on experience defining and governing data across large-scale Payment platforms or data ecosystems.
• Advanced data modelling expertise (conceptual, logical and physical), including semantic modelling for analytics and reporting.
• Strong understanding of enterprise data architecture and data platform design.
• Practical experience with metadata management, data cataloguing and lineage capabilities.
• Proven experience implementing automated data quality rules, controls and validation frameworks.
• Solid understanding of data privacy, sensitive data handling and regulatory expectations in banking environments.
• Experience working in large, complex, regulatory-aware organisations using agile or scaled-agile delivery models.

• Exposure to industry data governance frameworks (e.g., DAMA-DMBOK, DCAM, COBIT).
• Experience with in large global banks, Payment transformation programs or Transaction Banking functions.
• Familiarity with advanced data modelling techniques such as data vault or graph-based models.
• Knowledge of data observability and monitoring practices to assess data health and reliability across pipelines.

Experience supporting ISO 20022 migrations or Payment data modernization initiatives.