Senior Manager, Card Portfolio Management (Payments Futurist) at I&M Bank

Job Purpose:

• To drive strategic growth, profitability, and innovation across the bank’s card portfolio by leveraging deep payments expertise, customer analytics, emerging technologies, and ecosystem partnerships. 
• The role will proactively shape the bank’s future in digital payments, ensuring differentiated value propositions, superior portfolio performance, and readiness for next-generation payment trends.

Key Responsibilities:

Portfolio Performance & P&L Management:

• Own end-to-end performance of issuing portfolio: debit, credit, prepaid and premium segments.
• Set and deliver annual acquisition, activation, usage, spend, and revenue targets.
• Continuously optimize pricing, interchange strategies, FX markup revenue, and product profitability models.
• Identify under-performing segments and lead corrective actions.

Customer Lifecycle & Engagement Management:

• Develop curated lifecycle strategies – onboarding, activation, usage, cross-sell, dormancy, retention.
• Drive personalization using data/AI insights to maximize cardholder value.
• Lead top-spender programs, loyalty initiatives, and premium experiences to enhance engagement.

Product Innovation & Future-Ready Solutions:

• Scan global payment trends, emerging rails, ISO 20022 opportunities, tokenization, embedded finance, CBDCs, and real-time payments.
• Champion the introduction of future-facing products (contactless, virtual cards, tokenized solutions, wearables, card-on-file optimization, biometric cards, cross-border innovation).
• Develop use cases for AI in portfolio management (risk scoring, propensity models, offers optimization).
• Evaluate fintech partnerships and ecosystem expansions.

Risk & Compliance Management:

• Ensure credit risk, fraud risk, operational risk and regulatory compliance across the portfolio.
• Recommend policy changes for limits, exposure, velocity controls, and authorization strategies (including friendly-fraud mitigation).
• Lead interventions for cross-border fraud trends, merchant fraud, first-party abuse, and chargebacks.

Stakeholder & Partner Management:

• Collaborate closely with Business, Digital, Credit, Marketing, Operations, Fraud, and CX teams.
• Lead business cases for new partnerships, alliances, loyalty platforms, and co-branded card opportunities.

Operational Excellence & Process Digitization:

• Drive digital onboarding, instant issuance, Straight-Through Processing (STP) and workflow automation.
• Work with Technology & Ops to map and resolve customer pain points end-to-end.
• Improve authorization rates, chargeback turnaround, and disputes experience.

Academic Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in business, Finance, IT, Economics, or related field.
• Postgraduate qualification is an added advantage (MBA preferred).

Work Experience:

• 8–10+ years in card issuing, digital payments, portfolio or product management in a bank or fintech.
• Proven experience managing a card P&L and driving spend, revenue, and customer engagement.
• Strong exposure to credit card portfolio management and risk management.
• Experience working with international card schemes and payment processors.
• Demonstrated track record of leading digital transformation or payments innovation initiatives.

Key Competencies:
Payments Innovation & Emerging Tech:
Deep curiosity and understanding of:

• Tokenization, invisible payments.
• Real-time payments, ISO 20022, Open Banking APIs.
• AI in credit scoring and behavioral analytics.
• Digital identity, biometrics, cybersecurity.
• CBDCs, blockchain use cases.
• Embedded finance and marketplace payments.

Strategic Foresight & Market Intelligence:

• Ability to anticipate future payment models and translate them into business opportunities.
• Strong scenario-planning and trend-mapping capabilities.
• Ability to assess the long-term viability of technologies and fintech partnerships.

Data-Driven Portfolio Optimization:
Hands-on skills in using analytics for:

• Propensity modelling.
• Usage segmentation.
• Fraud anomaly detection.
• Customer lifetime value (CLTV) maximization.
• Spend behavior clustering.
• Understands how to embed data science in business decisioning.

Design Thinking & Customer-First Innovation:

• Ability to reimagine end-to-end customer journeys.
• Strong capability to convert customer pain points into digital product enhancements.
• Experience shaping value propositions for mass, affluent, SME and corporate customers.

Core Skills:

• Strong leadership and influence skills.
• High analytical capability and strategic thinking.
• Excellent communication, stakeholder management and presentation skills.
• Creativity and ability to drive innovation.
• Strong project management and execution discipline.
• Customer-centric mindset and problem-solving orientation.