Our Purpose
We work to connect and power an inclusive, digital economy that benefits everyone, everywhere by making transactions safe, simple, smart and accessible. Using secure data and networks, partnerships and passion, our innovations and solutions help individuals, financial institutions, governments and businesses realize their greatest potential. Our decency quotient, or DQ, drives our culture and everything we do inside and outside of our company. We cultivate a culture of inclusion for all employees that respects their individual strengths, views, and experiences. We believe that our differences enable us to be a better team – one that makes better decisions, drives innovation and delivers better business results.
Job Title
Senior Vice President, Technology and Operations, Vocalink Limited
This is an exciting opportunity to oversee technology and operations for Vocalink Limited, a company that enables the payments of 90% of salaries, 70% of utility bills, most ATM transactions and every cheque cleared in the UK.
The successful candidate will become part of a high functioning team, dedicated to delivering a robust, secure and resilient service to 60+million citizens every day with transactional volume of 11 billion/year and total annual transactional value in excess of GBP6 Trillion.
Head of Technology and Operations is a senior management role, with a reporting line to the Vocalink Limited CEO and a matrix reporting line to the President Operations & Technology for Mastercard.
The appointee will be responsible for developing the Operations & Technology strategy and delivery models to meet the growth needs of Vocalink and for meeting the operational and technical requirements of our core payments covered by the Vocalink business model including Bacs, Faster Payments, Imaging Cheque System, LINK, Payport, BGC.
The Role Holder Will
- Engage customers/partners in strategic dialogue and partnerships covering the full spectrum of Mastercard assets, capabilities and solutions.
- Determine and sponsor key business initiatives as opportunities arise taking into account the company’s commercial position; increasing revenue and maintaining optimised costs should be at the fore of business activities.
- Measure effectiveness and efficiency of operational processes both internally and externally and find ways to improve processes
- Design and implement business strategies, plans and procedures and set comprehensive goals for performance and growth
- Oversee daily operations of the company and evaluate performance by analysing and interpreting data and metrics
- Responsible for building capabilities for business and 1st line operational business steering and 1st line risk capability
- Provide mentoring and coaching to employees and share timely feedback
- Recruit skilled talent and maintain succession plans
- Responsible for the end-to-end delivery of all software development and changes
- Ensure a robust and forward-looking IT strategy is in place to focus the business on leading innovation for the industry.
- Develop the capability, functionality and capacity for growth in current and future service offerings; deliver approved programmes to time, cost and quality baselines.
- Responsible for the build, deployment, and maintenance of all Vocalink’s IT solutions, required to meet current and future demand.
- Maintain a cost effective balance of resources by selecting and engaging permanent, contract, and partner staff, while ensuring that Intellectual Property is managed according to Vocalink’s IT strategy.
- Responsible for the Customer Service Support and Operational Relationships, Service Assurance and Transition, ITSM processes and the 24 x 7 1st line Operational Response and the ongoing reliability of our applications across all UK services
- Responsible for assuring the service availability and SLAs for all UK operational systems, and in particular the company’s core system operations (Faster Payments, Imaging Cheque Service, LINK and Bacs)
- Maintain robust controls to mitigate operational risk and regularly trial business continuity procedures.
- Provide a high level of customer service through the contact centre and service desk teams which meet the needs of internal and external customers.
- Drive continuous improvements in customer service and ensure that all customers receive the same high level of care and a consistent experience.
- Responsible for Systems Platform Architecture - business engagement, service design, technology architecture and vendor engagement
- Responsible for Data Centre, Engineering, Platform & Network & Event Management build & run across UK services
Knowledge, Skills and Expertise (technical / role specific)
- Relevant experience of working in a complex (preferably multi-national) stakeholder environment that includes complex customers and regulators.
- Ability to articulate themselves clearly and concisely to a broad range of senior and junior stakeholders, acting as a bridge as well as guide for the implementation of new capabilities.
- Strong influencing skills; organizationally savvy
- Experience working with regulators (Bank of England supervision)
- Experience of presenting and communicating at board level
- Communication - requires effective communication skills – both written and oral - to deal with large diverse customer base (internal and external)
- Problem solving – excellent analysis and deductive skills
- Customer focus – passion for excellence
- Ethics – strong personal and professional ethics
- Highly motivated and conscientious individual
- Embodies and demonstrates all of the brand values required by Vocalink and Mastercard
- Ability to motivate, inspire and lead people effectively
- Line manager and a team player – leads by example
- Strategic thinker – able to develop and communicate direction
- Commercially aware
- Experience within Critical National Infrastructure responsible organisations
Corporate Security Responsibility
All activities involving access to Mastercard assets, information, and networks comes with an inherent risk to the organization and, therefore, it is expected that every person working for, or on behalf of, Mastercard is responsible for information security and must
- Abide by Mastercard’s security policies and practices;
- Ensure the confidentiality and integrity of the information being accessed;
- Report any suspected information security violation or breach, and
- Complete all periodic mandatory security trainings in accordance with Mastercard’s guidelines.