Senior Business Development Manager - Payments

📋 Description

• • As a Senior Business Development Manager - Payments at Sportygroup B.V., you will play a pivotal role in shaping the company’s global payments infrastructure by driving performance, reliability, and cost efficiency across its payments stack. This role is critical to enabling seamless transactions in high-growth emerging markets, directly impacting revenue stability, user experience, and scalability of Sporty Group’s platforms across Africa and LATAM.
• • You will own end-to-end relationships with payment partners, lead onboarding and negotiations, optimize payment flows, and ensure operational resilience — acting as the strategic bridge between product, risk, operations, and technology teams to deliver robust, localized payment solutions that support business expansion and customer trust.
• • What you’ll do day to day:
• • Establish and nurture strategic relationships with new and existing payment partners — including banks, PSPs, telcos, and aggregators — across multiple geographies, with a focus on Africa and LATAM, to expand Sporty Group’s payment capabilities and market reach.
• • Lead the end-to-end onboarding and negotiation process for new payment channels, ensuring alignment with commercial, technical, and regulatory requirements while accelerating time-to-launch for emerging market expansions.
• • Collaborate closely with Product, Risk, Operations, and Platform teams to ensure launch readiness, manage go-live activities, and optimize payment flows for higher success rates, lower latency, and improved failover resilience.
• • Work with Product to analyze payment performance data, identify bottlenecks or gaps in pay-in and payout flows, and drive iterative improvements that enhance user conversion and transaction reliability.
• • Establish and maintain monthly competitor benchmarking initiatives covering pricing, emerging payment trends, success rates, and settlement timelines, sharing insights with Product and Operations to inform strategic decisions.
• • Monitor and oversee key payment partner KPIs — including transaction success rates, latency, downtime, and cost per transaction — initiating improvement plans and holding partners accountable for performance SLAs.
• • Support Operations Leadership in downtime incident tracking, root cause analysis (RCA), and business continuity planning from a partnership management perspective, ensuring swift resolution and minimal disruption to users.
• • Partner with PSPs, telcos, banks, and internal tech/ops teams to troubleshoot issues, implement optimizations, and co-develop solutions that strengthen payment infrastructure resilience.
• • Collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Ops, Risk, and Tech teams to align on reliability improvements, fraud mitigation strategies, and scalable payment architecture enhancements.
• • About the team or company:
• • Sporty Group is a remote-first, sustainability-driven organization operating at the forefront of digital entertainment and gaming in emerging markets, with a mission to deliver accessible, engaging experiences through innovative technology and localized partnerships.
• • The Business Development team is a high-impact, cross-functional unit that partners closely with Product, Operations, and Technology to unlock growth opportunities, with this role sitting at the strategic core of payments innovation and market expansion.
• • What you can learn or achieve in this role:
• • Develop deep expertise in global payments ecosystems, particularly in complex, high-growth emerging markets like Africa and LATAM, positioning yourself as a leader in fintech partnership strategy and execution.
• • Gain end-to-end ownership of payment performance optimization — from partner negotiation and technical integration to ongoing KPI management — while influencing product roadmap and operational scalability at a fast-scaling, remote-first tech company.