Payments Implementation Manager

Stavtar•Southlake, TX

9d•Hybrid

About The Position

You own the end-to-end onboarding of a client's bank onto StavPay — from the first scoping call with the client and their bank, through key exchange and payment file certification, to the production penny test and handoff to support. This is a hybrid role by design: roughly half client- and bank-facing project management, half hands-on technical work with SFTP, PGP keys, and ISO 20022 payment files. You will be the single point of accountability for each bank connection and the connective tissue between the client, the bank's implementation manager, and our development and QA teams in India. Two parts of the job go beyond execution. When a client brings us a bank we haven't connected to before, you work directly with that bank's technical team to finalize the ISO 20022 specification and define what StavPay needs to support. And across every engagement, you are expected to actively compress the onboarding timeline — challenging bank-side sequencing rather than accepting it, and turning each onboarding into a faster template for the next. Volume is typically several concurrent onboardings at different phases. Each currently takes weeks to months, gated largely by bank timelines. We want the person in this seat to change that number.

Requirements

4+ years in bank/payments implementation, treasury implementation, cash management onboarding, or technical implementation at a fintech, bank, ERP, or treasury management system vendor.
Working fluency with ISO 20022 payment and reporting messages — pain.001, pain.002, camt.052/053 — and with NACHA ACH files.
Ability to open a file, read it, and determine why a bank rejected it.
Experience reading a bank's ISO 20022 implementation guide and turning it into a specification a development team can build from.
Experience in the room with the bank's format team agreeing field-level detail.
A track record of reducing implementation cycle time, with numbers.
Practical experience with host-to-host bank connectivity: SFTP, PGP/GPG encryption, SSH key pairs, key rotation.
Demonstrated ownership of bank certification/UAT cycles, including managing a bank's test script tracker to sign-off.
Willingness to negotiate with a bank rather than accept their first answer — on format deviations, on test scope, and on timeline.
Understanding of payment instruction data: account numbers, currency, IBAN, BIC/SWIFT, cross-border requirements.
Genuinely comfortable client-facing — you'll be on calls with controllers, CFOs, and bank relationship teams, and you'll be the one delivering bad news about timelines.
Able to run 3–6 concurrent projects with dependencies you don't control, and keep every stakeholder honest about status.
Overlap with India business hours for daily coordination with dev and QA.

Nice To Haves

Alternative asset management or fund administration background.
Direct experience onboarding to specific banks: JPMorgan, Citi, BNY, Goldman, HSBC, Northern Trust, First Republic-style regional banks.
Greenfield experience: having been the first person to connect a platform to a given bank, not only repeating an established integration.
SWIFT MT formats (MT101, MT940/942), RTP, Fedwire.
Bank reconciliation and cash application workflows.
Familiarity with Azure DevOps or similar for tracking work with engineering.
Basic scripting or comfort in a terminal (openssl, gpg, sftp clients).

Responsibilities

Own the end-to-end onboarding of a client's bank onto StavPay.
Manage client- and bank-facing project management.
Perform hands-on technical work with SFTP, PGP keys, and ISO 20022 payment files.
Act as the single point of accountability for each bank connection.
Serve as the connective tissue between the client, the bank's implementation manager, and development and QA teams.
Work directly with a bank's technical team to finalize ISO 20022 specifications for new bank connections.
Define StavPay's needs for supporting new bank connections.
Actively compress the onboarding timeline by challenging bank-side sequencing.
Turn each onboarding into a faster template for the next.
Scoping and kickoff: Send and walk clients through the banking scoping questionnaire; collect banking contacts.
Run the joint scoping call with the client's bank; translate client requirements into terms the bank's implementation team can act on.
Track fee negotiation and SOW execution between client and bank.
Hold the bank accountable to assigning an implementation manager and keeping the project moving.
New bank enablement and ISO specification: Obtain and interrogate the bank's ISO 20022 implementation guide / message implementation guideline (MIG) and file specifications.
Run the technical specification sessions with the bank's format and payments engineering teams: agree the exact pain.001 structure, mandatory and optional fields, character sets, batch vs. single, payment method coverage (ACH, RTP, wire, cross-border), and the reporting messages they will return (pain.002, camt.052/053/054).
Reconcile the bank's requirements against StavPay's existing template model — identify what maps cleanly, what needs configuration, and what genuinely requires development.
Write the specification our developers build to, and own it through pre-CAT.
Push back and negotiate to standard ISO before it becomes custom code we maintain forever.
Feed each new bank's specification into a reusable library so the second client onto that bank onboards dramatically faster than the first.
Compressing the onboarding timeline: Instrument the process: measure cycle time per phase, per bank, and know precisely where time is lost.
Build the case with each bank and negotiate faster paths — earlier IM assignment, parallel rather than sequential workstreams, pre-agreed test scenario sets, reduced certification scope for banks we've already been certified on.
Run steps in parallel wherever the dependency allows (spec analysis alongside key generation, client data collection during bank testing) rather than accepting the bank's default serial sequence.
Escalate stalls through the right channel — the client's banking relationship manager, not just the implementation manager.
Front-load everything client-side (entity details, debit accounts, banking contacts) so we are never the reason a bank milestone slips.
Turn each onboarding's lessons into a shorter runbook for the next one.
Technical setup and key exchange: Request and coordinate SSH/PGP key generation (2048-bit RSA) for UAT and production via our internal CMS; route for internal approval.
Exchange public keys with the bank over encrypted channels.
Verify initial SFTP connectivity for both UAT and production; store keys correctly in the key vault.
Work with the dev team on payment template configuration and FTP/PGP-to-template mapping — you specify and verify, they build.
Testing and bank certification: Collect legal entity and debit account details (account number, currency, IBAN/SWIFT for cross-border) from the client.
Coordinate creation of test vendors and payment instructions with QA.
Drive the bank's testing tracker to completion — every required scenario passing — and secure formal bank approval.
Push the bank to file the move-to-production request.
Production cutover and handoff: Connect to production SFTP; coordinate template mapping to the production connection.
Enable and validate CAMT reporting jobs; confirm receipt of pain.002, camt.052/053 and ACH return files.
Run the live penny test with the client and confirm it auto-reconciles end-to-end.
Close the project out cleanly — remove internal users from workflows, clear test data.
Hand off to Support and the onboarding BA with documentation good enough that they never need to call you.