The Director, Merchant Operations & Customer Growth is a senior leadership role responsible for converting qualified merchant applications into live, active, and retained customers. Reporting to the CRO, the Director owns the operational customer journey from application and onboarding through first transaction, ongoing usage, retention, and expansion, while coordinating closely with Sales and specialist functions.
Key Responsibilities:
Merchant Onboarding & Application Operations
- Own the merchant journey from formal account registration and application through operational readiness.
- Manage application completeness, document collection, follow-ups, operational pre-checks, and abandoned-application recovery.
- Establish clear case ownership, service standards, escalation mechanisms, and backlog management.
- Enable self-service applications to enter the operational process without requiring prior involvement from a salesperson.
Implementation & Activation
- Coordinate risk and upstream reviews, merchant configuration, device/API implementation, training, and first-transaction validation.
- Establish implementation plans, accountable owners, target launch dates, service expectations, and escalation paths.
- Identify and resolve operational barriers that delay merchant activation while respecting specialist ownership of approval, risk, technology, and settlement decisions.
- Identify why approved or signed merchants are not processing transactions and establish structured 7/30/60/90-day activation programs.
Customer Success, Retention & Growth
- Monitor time to first transaction, payment usage, merchant experience, and early indicators of customer disengagement.
- Segment merchants based on activity, declining volume, inactivity, growth potential, number of locations, and seasonality.
- Develop customer education, reactivation, service-recovery, and usage-growth programs.
- Identify opportunities for additional locations, products, and payment methods, referring pricing, contract changes, and commercial negotiations to Sales.
Existing Merchant Local-Card Expansion
- Build and maintain a qualified list of existing merchants with local-card expansion potential.
- Analyze current acquiring arrangements, unused capacity, merchant needs, and barriers to adoption.
- Partner with Sales to convert commercially negotiated opportunities and then own post-sale implementation, activation, usage, and retention measurement.
Operational Analytics & Process Improvement
- Connect application, merchant, location, product, and transaction data to identify losses and friction across the customer journey.
- Establish operational dashboards and measurable service standards covering application processing, backlog, time to first transaction, usage, and retention.
- Run process experiments and translate findings into concrete customer and operational improvements.
- Provide data-driven recommendations to Product and Technology based on recurring merchant usage and onboarding issues.
Team Leadership & Service Management
- Lead teams responsible for onboarding coordination, activation, customer success, and operational analytics.
- Establish SOPs, quality controls, workload planning, service standards, and regular performance reviews.
- Coordinate transaction, settlement, technology, and customer-service issues with the appropriate specialist teams and track resolution through closure.
What you bring to the table:
- 8+ years of experience in merchant operations, payment implementation, customer success, customer growth, or a related fintech environment.
- Demonstrated experience managing merchant onboarding, implementation, activation, and/or customer lifecycle operations.
- Strong understanding of merchant activation, retention, usage growth, and expansion.
- Proven ability to lead frontline operational teams and establish scalable SOPs, service standards, and escalation processes.
- Strong analytical capability with the ability to independently validate operational and customer-growth metrics.
- Strong cross-functional collaboration skills across Sales, Product, Technology, Risk, Compliance, Finance, and payment partners.
- Commercial mindset with disciplined judgment around customer growth, operational capacity, risk, and service quality.
Preferred
- Experience in card acquiring, payment processing, merchant services, or cross-border payments.
- Experience managing a portfolio of SMB, enterprise, multi-location, or platform merchants.
- Experience improving application-to-activation conversion and reducing time to first transaction.
- Experience building customer-success or merchant-growth programs using transaction and behavioral data.
- Experience working in a high-growth fintech or payments organization.
