Senior Business Development Manager, Payments

About the Senior Business Development Manager, Payments Role at Sporty Group

Sporty Group is seeking a Senior Business Development Manager, Payments (transitioning to a Director level position) to join our Business Development team. This critical role focuses on driving performance, reliability, and cost efficiency across our global payments stack. Situated at the intersection of Partnerships, Product, Operations, and Analytics, you will own business relationships, performance, success rates, uptime, and onboarding for both existing and emerging markets.

What You'll Be Doing

• Establish and curate relationships with new and existing Payment Partners across multiple Geos for Sporty Group.
• Drive onboarding and negotiations of new payment partners (including, but not limited to Banks, PSPs, Telcos, Aggregators, etc.) and channels in Africa & LATAM.
• Work closely with Product, Risk, Operations, and Platform teams for launch readiness and payment channel Go-live.
• Collaborate with Product on optimizing payment flows, failover management, identifying gaps, and driving growth and performance across pay-ins and payouts.
• Establish monthly competitor benchmarking (pricing, new payment trends, success rates, settlement) with Product and Operation.
• Track and oversee Payment Partner KPIs improvements: success rates, latency, downtime, and cost per transaction.
• Support Operations Leadership for downtime tracking, RCA, and business continuity planning from a Partnership Management standpoint.
• Work closely with PSPs, telcos, banks, and internal ops teams to improve performance.
• Collaborate with Product, Ops, Risk, and Tech teams on flow and reliability improvements.

What You'll Bring

• 10+ years in payments, fintech, e-commerce, or transaction-heavy platforms.
• Strong understanding of the payment landscape and experience across African and LATAM Markets.
• Strong understanding of PSPs, mobile money, cards, and local payment rails.
• A self-starter, comfortable operating in low-structure, high-velocity environments typical of emerging markets.
• Data-driven mindset with strong communications and negotiation skills.
• Strong stakeholder management skills across product, operations, tech, and external partners.
• A builder mindset who thrives in greenfield and scale-up environments.
• Demonstrated ability to manage multiple work streams in parallel without loss of execution quality.
• Strong structuring skills, able to turn ambiguity into clear plans, frameworks, and outcomes.
• High autonomy with the confidence to own decisions and execution end-to-end.
• Fluency in both written and spoken English is essential.

What's In It For You

• Sporty is a remote-first company in pursuit of sustainability.
• A competitive salary + individual performance-based bonuses every quarter.
• 28 days paid annual leave.
• Referral bonuses & flash bonuses.
• Top-of-the-line equipment.
• Annual company retreats to provide great internal networking opportunities.

Key skills/competency

• Payments Business Development
• Partnership Management
• Emerging Markets (Africa/LATAM)
• Payment Gateway Optimization
• Negotiation Skills
• Stakeholder Management
• KPI Tracking & Improvement
• Fintech Expertise
• Mobile Money
• E-commerce Payments