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Salary: USD 250,000 - 300,000 / annual
Fanatics Betting & Gaming is seeking a VP, Strategic Payments to define and lead the payments strategy across the growing sports betting and gaming business. Payments are critical to customer experience and business scalability, and this leader will ensure the payments ecosystem delivers seamless experiences while supporting growth, economics, and expansion into new markets.
The role owns both strategic and commercial sides of payments, including relationships with payment providers, banks, processors, and key partners. You will develop and execute a comprehensive payments strategy focused on improving deposit and withdrawal experiences, increasing payment success and reliability, optimizing costs, strengthening vendor performance, and enabling launches in new markets.
Key responsibilities include:
**Develop & Own Payments Strategy**: Define and execute long-term payments strategy aligned with customer experience, growth, market expansion, and financial objectives. Identify opportunities to improve deposit/withdrawal experiences, develop roadmaps for ecosystem evolution, evaluate emerging payment methods and technologies, and establish success metrics using data to drive continuous improvement.
**Optimize Payment Performance & Economics**: Develop strategies to improve authorization and deposit success rates while maintaining frictionless customer experience. Own strategic evaluation of payment costs across providers and methods, partner with Finance, Product, Engineering, Risk, and Fraud teams to understand performance drivers, analyze payment flows to identify friction points, and balance customer experience with cost and risk considerations.
**Lead Payment Vendor & Banking Relationships**: Lead payments strategy and go-to-market planning for expansion into new jurisdictions, determining required partners, banking infrastructure, and capabilities. Own and strengthen strategic relationships with payment providers, processors, and financial institutions. Serve as senior point of contact for key partners, lead commercial negotiations, develop understanding of partner capabilities, and understand banking and merchant infrastructure supporting payment flows.
**Enable New Market Launches**: Lead payments strategy and go-to-market planning for Fanatics Betting & Gaming's expansion into new markets. Determine payment requirements, partners, banking infrastructure, and capabilities needed for successful launches. Work cross-functionally to ensure payment capabilities are ready ahead of market launches and leverage payments expertise to navigate complex partner and banking requirements.
**Partner Across Product, Engineering & Business**: Serve as strategic payments leader connecting commercial priorities with Product and Engineering. Translate complex payment and business challenges into clear problem statements and business requirements. Articulate customer and financial impact of payment issues, partner closely with Payments Engineering and Product Management to develop balanced solutions, and build strong relationships across Business Development, Finance, Operations, Risk, Fraud, Compliance, Legal, Product, and Engineering.
**Requirements:**
- Experience launching payment capabilities or supporting payment go-to-market strategies in new markets or jurisdictions
- Demonstrated ability to manage and negotiate strategic relationships with major payment vendors and financial partners
- Significant experience in payments strategy, payment partnerships, fintech, banking, payment processing, acquiring, or related field, ideally within complex consumer-facing digital business
- Demonstrated experience developing and implementing payments strategy at scale
- Deep understanding of payments ecosystem, including payment processors, digital wallets, acquiring banks, merchant relationships, payment rails, merchant IDs (MIDs), authorization flows, deposits, withdrawals, and payment economics
- Strong payments industry knowledge and established relationships across payment ecosystem
- Strong commercial and analytical mindset with experience evaluating payment costs, vendor economics, acceptance rates, customer conversion, and overall payment performance
- Proven ability to work effectively with Product and Engineering organizations and translate business problems into clear, actionable requirements
- Ability to communicate complex payment concepts in simple and compelling way to technical and non-technical audiences
- Strong executive presence with ability to influence senior leaders, external partners, and cross-functional stakeholders
- Comfortable operating in fast-paced environment where priorities evolve quickly
- Experience in sports betting, gaming, fintech, marketplaces, e-commerce, or high-volume digital payments environment preferred
