How to build a great payments team

For enterprise and e-commerce businesses, payments are a driver of growth. They shape the customer experience, open up new markets, and deliver measurable results. 

For payments professionals, that shift brings opportunity and pressure. You’re in a role that’s expanding first, often leading a team that’s either still forming or scaling quickly. Whether you’re starting from scratch or working with an existing structure, how you build your team will define the impact you can deliver. 

It’s about building for performance today and readiness for tomorrow.

So, how do you get it right?

We spoke to experienced payments leaders across industries to learn what it takes to build a team that is set up for long-term success.

Key roles to hire in your payments team

The payments landscape is constantly evolving. New methods, tighter security measures, and shifting ecommerce trends are reshaping what customers expect – and how businesses compete. Failure to keep up could put you at a competitive disadvantage and frustrate customers who demand only the latest and most convenient payment options. 

That means making strategic hires that can keep up with new payment trends while ensuring you have key talent in place to manage the more evergreen and equally crucial aspects of your payments operation, like risk analysis and compliance. 

Here are the key roles to hire for in your payments team: 

Payments Analytics

A dedicated data team can turn raw data into strategic insight. Analytics should form the cornerstone of your payments team. Analyzing your payments data is vital to assessing your business's ongoing performance so that you can spot limitations and improve your operational efficiency. 

Having a dedicated data team is the best way to make the most of your data, as they can be solely responsible for turning the masses of data points your business generates into actionable insights. 

Here are some key analytics roles to hire:

Data scientist 

Data scientists are responsible for analyzing and interpreting data from multiple sources by using tools like AI, machine learning, and statistical modeling to transform it into a more usable format. For example, data scientists can be the first to spot sudden change in acceptance rates that could damage your revenue, and can draw insights from customer data to help improve user experience. 

Fraud analyst 

Fraud is a constant problem for e-commerce businesses, which is why it’s essential to have a dedicated individual or team that’s tasked with spotting and flagging suspicious activity. Fraud analysts use machine learning and rules-based systems to automate their search for criminality, but human expertise still matters, especially when adapting to emerging threats. 

Risk analyst 

Risk analysts monitor market conditions and payments data to identify financial and operational risks that could impact your business. By using modelling tools and scenario analysis, they assess exposure to everything from economic volatility to liquidity and chargeback risk. Their insights help guide strategic decisions like expanding into new markets or rolling out new payment methods, and ensure your business remains resilient in changing conditions. 

Risk analysts also play a key role in aligning your operation with evolving regulatory requirements, working closely with compliance and finance teams to keep risk under control. 

Product management

Product management is the function in your payments operation that’s responsible for delivering great products by ensuring productive collaboration between different roles. 

Product manager 

Hiring a payments product manager should be one of your first priorities. This role sits at the center of your payments strategy and is accountable for finding product-market fit and delivering the experiences your customers expect.

They’ll define the roadmap, set objectives, and align stakeholders across the business from engineering to finance to customer experience. To do that well, they’ll need a deep understanding of your customer needs and the mechanics of the payments ecosystem including interchange costs, dispute fees, and any market-specific considerations that impact cost and performance.

Payments are a complex value chain. Your product manager will need to navigate issuing and acquiring banks, card networks, and payment gateways, bringing it all together in a way that’s scalable, compliant, and future-ready. 

Product and UX designers

The design function shapes every part of your customers’ payments journey – from the first touch to the final transaction. Working closely with UX researchers, designers will map out the end-to-end experience, ensuring it’s intuitive for customers while meeting legal, regulatory, and risk requirements.

The team will design the full suite of customer-facing interfaces – dashboards, screens, and copy- bringing your payments product to life. These might include tools for tracking payouts, reviewing performance data, or managing disputes and refunds.

Consistency matters too. Designers should standardize the look and feel of key moments across the journey, including the checkout flow and payment confirmation emails, to reinforce trust and elevate the customer experience. 

Engineers 

Engineers power the build. You’ll need developers with experience in both backend integrations and user-facing flows. Payments products often interface with gateways, enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, and accounting platforms – so flexibility and system thinking are key. 

Engineers also bring the design team’s work to life, building intuitive onboarding flows and dashboards that give customers real control. As your product evolves, they’ll be responsible for driving optimization and improving conversion and authorization rates. 

UX Researcher 

UX researchers focus on how users interact with your payments product – using data, interviews, and usability testing to uncover what works and what doesn’t. Their insights guide the design process, helping teams build experiences that are clear, trustworthy, and easy to navigate – especially in critical moments like checkout or authentication. 

Operations

Operations staff ensure your organization is efficient by overseeing some its most vital day-to-day aspects. 

Program Manager 

Payments involve a complex network of internal stakeholders and external partners, from processors and banks to fraud vendors and compliance teams. A program manager acts as the central coordination point, keeping everyone aligned and accountable.

Their focus is on driving execution. This means managing third-party relationships, resolving issues fast, and ensuring internal processes are designed for scale. They’ll also take the lead on key initiatives like setting KPIs, shaping team structure, and optimizing workflows to keep performance high. 

Compliance Specialist

Payment regulations are complex, fast-changing, and vary significantly by region. From anti-money laundering and Know Your Customer (KYC) obligations to PCI DSS and local licensing requirements, there’s a lot to keep up with, and the stakes are high. Non-compliance can lead to fines, reputational damage, and even the suspension of operations.

A compliance specialist helps protect your business by monitoring the regulatory landscape, interpreting what changes mean for your operations, and ensuring up-to-date internal policies. They also work cross-functionally, collaborating with legal, risk, product, and engineering to ensure compliance is built into processes. 

A compliance specialist is critical to scaling safely and sustainably for any business looking to expand internationally or work with regulated entities. 

Payment reconciliation

Payment reconciliation is one of the most important behind-the-scenes functions in a payments operation. It’s the process of comparing internal records, like those in your finance system, with external sources such as processor reports and bank statements, to ensure all transactions match up. 

When done well, reconciliation keeps financial reporting accurate, quickly highlights discrepancies, and helps prevent revenue leakage. When done poorly, it can lead to costly errors, delayed payouts, and mistrust between teams.

8 steps to building a great payments team

Here are seven things you can do to ensure you have the best possible team, no matter the nature of your business.

Step 1: Tailor your team to your business model

Very few organizations have specialist payments teams that are more than a decade old. It’s a function that’s grown fast, not one built on legacy. On one hand, this gives you the chance to craft something unique. On the other hand, knowing which way is the right way forward can be challenging.

Your team format will depend on a range of factors: transaction volume, risk profile, channel mix, product type, and market coverage. Some large retailers split out dedicated teams for infrastructure, optimization, experience, and analytics. 

Step 2: Encourage innovation with a multidisciplinary team

Great payments teams don’t just keep things running. They improve and innovate. To do that, they need to draw on a broad set of capabilities across tech, business, compliance, customer experience, ops, and finance.

This includes hiring from outside the traditional payments pool. Bringing in product, marketing, digital experience, or customer service expertise can help the team align with business priorities.

Step 3: Make the most of the resources you already have 

Building your team from the ground up lets you make the most of what you already have by using resources and people to the best advantage. Identify current skills and capabilities and use vendors to plug any gaps or add specific layers of expertise, like risk management.  

Understand your team's ambitions to allow for growth within your structure. Find out what roles they’re aiming for and what training and tools they need to get there. Where possible, avoid getting locked into manager-led hierarchies. Instead, ensure your team has multiple career paths that allow individuals to focus on specialist areas but with plenty of opportunity for advancement.

When you’re working with limited internal resources, focus and alignment become your biggest performance levers. 

Step 4: Treat vendors as team assets

Choosing the right partners can make or break your payments performance. Look beyond feature sets and pricing to culture, fit, and flexibility. Have clear SLAs and measurements in place. 

If you inherit legacy vendors, check that they’re still delivering value. Talk to your team to uncover barriers or bottlenecks. Spot collaboration issues early and fix them fast.

Whether new or established, your vendors should be treated like part of the team, with access to the right people, systems, and goals. 

Step 5: Use specialist roles to lift payments to a different level

It goes without saying that roles which keep mission-critical payments live, secure, and ready to take a sale are essential. However, some roles, like payments analytics, are strategically important.  

Transactional data offers a huge wealth of information on customer behavior, shopping trends, operational and resource efficiency, and real-time performance. Having teams that can gather, analyze and deliver accurate and useful data across the business can be a key differentiator.

Step 6: Lead in a way that helps others succeed 

Great payments leaders don't just improve systems, they enable people. That means problem-solving, sharing ideas across disciplines, and creating a culture where collaboration is the norm, not the exception. The goal is a team that consistently delivers value and keeps getting better.

Improvement doesn’t just come from technology, it comes from trust. As Chris Uriarte, Partner at Glenbrook Partners, explains, that starts at the top: 

“A leader needs to develop a culture of trust and empowerment. You have to trust your team and their ability to execute. People become very conservative and cautious without trust, which stifles innovation.”

“When a leader thinks they can do all the heavy lifting themselves, in my experience, their team generally doesn’t succeed. You really need to empower your people to succeed. The team needs to believe in you as a leader and be comfortable enough working with you to make a leap of faith, try different things, and feel like they’ll be supported.” 

That human element matters. Leadership isn’t just about structure or strategy, it’s about empowering people. As Rasmus Rolén, Chief Commercial Officer and Executive Director at TF Bank, puts it: 

“If I come into the office super happy and have this positive energy around me, I know that will inspire others to do good work.”

Step 7: Keep the focus on the end user 

Your team’s job is to make payments work better for the business, and for the customer. Knowing where and how their role fits into customer engagement, sales and success helps keep your team focused and motivated. It can also help shape your payments strategy.  

Step 8. Keep evolving as you scale 

As your business grows, your payments team will be critical in driving performance. But what works today won’t always work tomorrow.

Keep checking in on your team’s structure, performance, and alignment with your goals. Use these steps as a reference point and be ready to adapt.

Build your payments team with Checkout.com

Whether you’re a payment facilitator or marketplace, build your payments team with Checkout.com, and you can take advantage of advanced tools like fraud detection, 3D Secure, and granular data and reporting. 

Through our single payments API and developer-friendly tools, your team will be empowered to create optimized payments strategies and brilliant customer experiences.