Group Product Manager - Financial Services

Wave HQ

About The Position

Wave is seeking a strategic product leader for the Group Product Manager, Financial Services role. This position is responsible for Wave/SMB’s payments capabilities and broader financial services experiences, enabling small businesses to manage, move, and trust their money. The role involves leading Product Managers across various domains including payments acceptance and processing, platform modernization, risk and fraud mitigation, and future financial services development. The ideal candidate will balance immediate needs like platform stability, compliance, and customer trust with a long-term vision for financial services that enhance the SMB experience. This is a coach-player role requiring the ability to work with senior stakeholders, delve into operational and technical details, and guide Product Managers through complex situations.

Requirements

8+ years of experience in product management.
Minimum of 5 years in the fintech industry.
2+ years leading product teams at the Group level or above.
Deep expertise in financial services, ideally with a strong background in payments acquiring, acceptance, payment facilitation, fraud and risk controls, and processor or platform partnerships.
In-depth knowledge of financial products onboarding experiences, including KYC and KYB, and risk and fraud mitigation practices.
Experience with payment processor or platform partnerships and migrations at scale is a strong plus.
Proven track record leading product teams and taking new products from ideation to launch to scale in a fintech environment.
Comfort operating under compliance, regulatory, and audit constraints without losing sight of customer and business outcomes.
Demonstrated judgment on where to apply AI — able to identify high-leverage opportunities to improve team productivity, as well as opportunities to strengthen fraud/risk decisioning or the customer experience.
Strong stakeholder management and leadership skills, with the ability to effectively communicate and influence across the organization.
Proven ability to prioritize and make hard decisions in a fast-paced environment, while actively identifying and mitigating issues.
Strong people leadership experience, including leading Product Managers, developing talent, setting priorities, and building high-performing teams, with genuine comfort operating as a coach-player.
Excellent written, verbal, and interpersonal communication skills, including the ability to explain technical and financial concepts clearly to non-technical audiences and influence senior stakeholders.
Bachelor's degree in Business, Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, Data-related field, or a related discipline, or the equivalent through a combination of education and relevant work experience.

Nice To Haves

Experience in environments where reliability, fraud exposure, compliance obligations, customer trust, and business continuity all need to be managed at the same time.

Responsibilities

Define and own the product vision and strategy for Financial Services for the Small Business product suite.
Lead the team through active platform modernization work, including payments infrastructure migration, reducing fraud exposure, resolving reliability gaps, and restoring/building customer trust.
Own uptime, reliability, and observability commitments for payments surfaces, partnering with Engineering and Data teams to meet aggressive platform stability SLAs.
Partner closely with Fraud/Risk Operations, Compliance, and Security on onboarding, underwriting, and fraud mitigation practices.
Collaborate with other product leads, particularly Accounting and Tax, to ensure seamless integration of payments/financial services workflows.
Manage key stakeholders and business partners across Engineering, Design, Customer Success, Finance, Risk/Fraud Operations, Compliance, Security, and Marketing.
Craft logical business cases, understand financial impacts, and define/execute business and customer benefit OKRs.
Use data to prioritize opportunities, demonstrate product value, and impact KPIs.
Identify opportunities for AI to improve team productivity, fraud detection, risk decisioning, operational workflows, or the customer-facing experience.
Present compelling strategy and plans as a subject matter expert in financial services.
Build and coach a high-performing product team by setting clear ownership, raising product thinking quality, connecting strategy to execution, and fostering cross-functional collaboration.
Foster a culture of continuous improvement, driving operational excellence through retrospectives, coaching, and refinement of team processes.