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Salary: USD 234,000 - 275,000 / annual
CLEAR is building a secure identity platform transforming how people live, work, and travel. The Director, Payments Performance will own payment authorization, renewal recovery, fraud and dispute performance, and cost of acceptance across CLEAR's platform serving 43+ million members.
Reporting to the SVP of Product, you will drive payment performance end-to-end, working alongside the Payments Product Lead who owns the platform and Member-facing experiences. Your focus is on how the system performs—turning payment performance insights into product, processor, network, and issuer action.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own CLEAR's payment performance end-to-end, driving first-attempt authorization rates, renewal recovery, involuntary churn reduction, fraud and chargeback performance, false-positive rates, and effective cost of acceptance.
- Diagnose performance across issuers, networks, card types, wallets, channels, and Member cohorts; establish a single source of truth for payments performance and translate decline patterns into prioritized opportunities.
- Define and drive CLEAR's authorization and recovery roadmap with Product, Engineering, and Analytics, optimizing retry and dunning strategies, network tokens, account updater, stored credentials, transaction messaging, routing, wallets, fraud controls, and authentication.
- Lead CLEAR's performance relationships with processors, card networks, and issuers, holding partners accountable to benchmarks, resolving systemic approval issues, and evaluating opportunities across routing, acquiring, and processor strategy.
- Partner across Product, Finance, Analytics, Engineering, and Member Support to run rigorous experiments, balance approval gains with fraud and dispute exposure, improve payment economics, and evolve CLEAR's payments strategy as the company expands into new products, partners, and markets.
Success metrics include increased first-attempt authorization rates, increased recovery of failed renewals, reduced payment-related involuntary churn, fraud and chargeback rates maintained within targets, and reduced effective cost of acceptance while improving overall payment performance and recovered revenue.
Requirements:
- 10+ years of deep payments experience on the merchant or acceptance side of a high-volume consumer or subscription business, processor, or card network, with direct accountability for authorization and payment performance.
- Expert knowledge of card payment economics and transaction lifecycles, including issuer decisioning, recurring billing, decline optimization, network tokenization, account updater, stored credentials, fraud and disputes, and network monitoring programs.
- Ability to turn complex payment data into action, with experience working directly with data and SQL, developing analyses such as decline waterfalls, and translating insights into product decisions and measurable business outcomes.
- Track record of influencing across the payments ecosystem, partnering directly with processors, networks, and issuers to diagnose systemic issues, improve performance, negotiate effectively, and drive accountability.
- Strong product and commercial judgment, with experience partnering with Product and Engineering to ship improvements, design rigorous experiments, and balance Member experience, revenue, fraud risk, and payment economics.
