Strategist, Card Authorization

About the team

The Global Payments Performance Team identifies payment optimization opportunities for Stripe’s merchants. The Global Payments Performance team serves a critical role both in demonstrating thought leadership on challenging payment topics, and also partnering with our high-potential merchants to set them up for long term success. We want a partnership with Stripe to be a competitive advantage for our customers, large and small, by providing them with best-in-class technology in concert with insightful and specific advice on how to harness this technology to achieve their business goals.

The Global Payments Performance team will be responsible for leading data-driven discussions with existing and prospective merchants on optimisation strategies across a variety of areas including card network costs, acceptance, fraud, and cross-border flows to start. You will be instrumental in building our optimisation narratives/tools and delivering on our merchant engagement model. You will also collaborate with Sales, deploying your knowledge to differentiate Stripe to win deals, and partner with our Customer Success organization to ensure that merchants are successful working with Stripe.

• Lead discussions with existing and prospective merchants, and provide the Sales team with tools and training to lead discussions with merchants and prospects.
• Serve as both an internal and merchant-facing expert on payment optimisation strategies.
• Gather and build on Stripe’s wide-ranging payments expertise to create optimisation narratives/tools supported by rigorous analysis.
• Use existing tools to deploy sophisticated optimisation playbooks and analyses across Stripe’s customer portfolio.
• Synthesise and relay customer feedback and our findings to inform Stripe’s product roadmap.
• Provide feedback on our tools and playbooks to help continuously improve our self‑serve offerings.

• 5+ years of experience in payments or operations at a leading technology company, or consultancy in the payments industry.
• Expertise is diagnosing root cause of card authorization rate underperformance, and suggesting actionable steps to address root cause issues identified.
• Deep understanding of how to improve merchant, card authorization rates (e.g. ISO message optimization, retry logic, issuer level analysis etc.).
• Ability to partner with merchants to structure and deliver a/b tests that compare card authorization rate performance across PSPs.
• Experience helping merchants onboard to a new PSP such that their authorization rate performance is optimal from day one.

• Experience with SQL, dashboard building, modeling, or reporting.
• Understanding of card network rules and regulations, local payment methods, and the regulatory environment (PSD2/PSD3).
• Experience presenting to senior business leaders.
• Ability to advise merchants on how to manage fraud, primarily on card transactions but ideally on alternative payment methods as well.
• An understanding of how to reduce merchant level interchange and scheme fees.