Interim Payment Operations Specialist

Role

Who you are

• Deep, hands-on experience running high-volume, complex payment or billing operations
• A track record of owning reconciliation end to end in a regulated or complex-transaction environment
• Strong first-principles operational thinking - can take a messy process and reflow it cleanly
• Available to start quickly and comfortable operating in a fast-moving, ambiguous environment
• If you're excited about this role but not sure you meet every requirement, we'd still love to hear from you. Your unique perspective could be exactly what we're looking for

Desirable

• Energy / utilities payments exposure (half-hourly metering, the utilities layer), though context is available from the wider team
• Exposure to automating or systematising payment operations

What the job involves

• As our Payment CX function takes ownership of the experiential side of payments, an operational gap opens up: the monthly assembly and execution of a £20m+ payment run, plus the reconciliation and admin behind it, currently rests heavily on a small team and is creaky already
• This is a load-bearing, revenue-critical process that is not going away in the next six months
• We need senior cover now to run it confidently and reduce single-person risk, while we accelerate the work to automate it - a bridge, not a permanent backfill of the old shape
• We're hiring a Payment Operations Specialist on a six-month contract
• This is a senior, hands-on operational role to bridge a live gap while we build our way out of it
• You'll take ownership of the monthly payment run end to end and the reconciliation and admin around it, giving us contingency and confidence in a process we can't afford to drop
• This is back-of-house operations, not a customer-facing role

Key Responsibilities:

• Own the assembly and execution of the monthly £20m+ payment run
• Make sure every customer who should be billed is billed, and every payment owed is collected
• Reconcile incoming funds and resolve edge cases (BACS returns, back payments, misattributed funds)
• Reduce key-person risk by documenting and de-risking the run so it no longer depends on one person
• You will report into the Service Manager, Customer Operations
• Assemble the monthly payment run accurately and on time
• Validate that the right customers are charged the right amounts
• Execute the run and manage the reconciliation of funds afterwards
• Chase down billing and collection gaps so owed revenue actually lands
• Triage and resolve high-priority edge cases and exceptions
• Handle the operational admin that follows the run each month
• Map the current process end to end so it's no longer locked in one person's head
• Build the documentation and contingency that lets others run it confidently
• Flag the highest-value automation opportunities to the team building toward that

Engagement & Terms:

• Six-month contract, with scope to extend or transition by mutual agreement
• Day rate to reflect the seniority and the urgency
• Remote first and flexible working, with clear core hours and no internal meetings on Friday afternoons