Head, Business Planning & Strategic Initiatives

Team Summary

The Thailand team comprises of a highly motivated group of problem solvers who create impactful engagement with our stakeholders – market ecosystem, clients, and internal functional leaders. We are a close-knit team that operates through information transparency, diversity of opinions and shared understanding. Through a unified set of high-impact and challenging goals, we often go beyond our roles, in close collaboration towards our common purpose.

If you are highly comfortable with uncertainties working in a market role, are equipped with the thematic, numeric, and technical background of the payments industry, driven to connect these pieces for problem solving or to create an intricate strategy for the Thailand market, passionate in executing the initiatives into fruition yet also enjoy the banter with our clients, you should apply.

Role Description:

This key role will report to the Country Manager and support business operations and strategic initiatives to drive strong business outcomes. As the conduit to all key functions supporting the country team, this leader will be responsible for charting the market’s overall business management routines while ensuring a cohesive and reportable approach to drive against our country priorities. This is a role with high visibility as the role will interact with Senior Leadership within the business while representing the market by collaborating with a variety of cross-functional partners, such as Finance, Sales Excellence, Product, Commercial & Money Movement, Marketing, Merchant Sales & Acquiring teams on business planning and organisation engagement to ensure success.

To be successful in this role, this leader should be familiar with the Thailand market landscape and be comfortable synthesising all available data to drive performance management and anticipate changes in the operating environment (both internally and externally). This leader must be relentlessly focused on setting clear priorities and maintaining strong process discipline. There are two key areas of focus for this role:

Country Strategy & Execution

• Business Planning: This leader should be able to rally the broader team to drive the implementation of the Country strategy and close tracking of Objectives & Key Results (OKRs). The ideal candidate should have the ability to not only lead the team, but also influence their peers, have a keen eye for detail, excellent organisational and communication skills, and the ability to balance big-picture thinking with hands-on execution. On an ongoing basis, the leader will develop and implement policies, procedures, and guidelines to streamline processes and improve efficiency for optimal operational performance.
• Performance management: Lead the business performance management process and preparation for Business Reviews with Visa's executive management, regular performance reporting/dashboard for the country management view and across key strategic initiatives monitoring. This leader should be able to instantly grasp time-bound challenges and opportunities with numerate uncertainties to analyse the situation, consult cross-functional team leadership. These challenges and opportunities could cover a wide range of business topics eg. Pricing (Interchange, Network), Deals (Structuring, Modelling), Clients (Engagements, Optimisation, Capabilities) and Execution (Processes, Policies, Regulation).

Strategic Initiatives – the topics might vary at any point in time and these are some examples of the Strategic Initiatives that this leader will cover.

• Cross-border: As Cross-border is an important metric and lever for the Thailand business, this leader will represent the business in the Asia Pacific Cross-border group and drive the ideation, analysis and delivery of step-change strategic initiatives to grow cross-border revenue and market share. This will include working with other functions like marketing, product and country sales (clients) to drive the commercial value proposition and market demand.
• New business development and market development: As the Thailand market is mature and highly competitive, we need to be on a continual look-out for new business opportunities and capability development. This would include identifying and scoping the opportunity, developing the go-to-market plan, external sales collateral, workshops, and internal solution guides that translate to customised external client pitch materials. By collaborating with cross functional teams, the leader will plan the initial pipeline of clients, establish engagement principle, expansion direction and operationalise the end-to-end plan which might include working with external partners and consultants.

What you will need:

Key Competencies

• Ability to influence members of the organization across all levels.
• Ability to manage complex strategic, analytical and organizational issues.
• Be decisive and lead change, ability to prioritize and drive focus, execution.
• Ability to articulate vision and motivate team members to achieve company priorities linked to the vision.
• Ability to bridge gaps of knowledge, understanding and cultural backgrounds.

Characteristics

• Positive, collaborative personality that will collaborate effectively with the Visa Thailand team.
• Resilient character that will be able to manage and execute the multitude of time-bound initiatives.
• Creative problem solver for the dynamic client and every changing Thailand market

Requirements

• Minimum 15 years of experience, preferably with payments and digital commerce background, strategic and business planning, project or program management, financial analysis and forecasting, and enterprise risk management, ideally from within a complex management organization or consulting firm
• Proven track record of delivering high impact results working on projects in the areas of corporate strategy, growth initiatives and new market, segment, as well as business strategies will be an advantage.
• Broad knowledge of payments industry, its products, services and technologies
• Strong management skills appropriate to a fast-paced business environment is preferred
• Proven ability to build creditability, influence and negotiate at the highest levels within international organizations.