Senior Product Manager - Account-to-Account Payments

We’re Acquired

At Acquired, we're on a mission to revolutionise recurring payments, and we're growing fast. We're building smart, customer-centric solutions by tackling complex problems with data, ingenuity, and a commitment to a scalable, robust core platform.

We are looking for an experienced, commercially minded, and deeply analytical Senior Product Manager to own our account-to-account payments portfolio, spanning collections and e-money. You will take Open Banking payments and Variable Recurring Payments from pilot to a repeatable product, own our Direct Debit capability, and shape the product implications of our e-money permissions.

Your Mission

As Senior Product Manager - Account-to-Account Payments, you'll own the strategy, roadmap, and execution across two areas: collections, covering Direct Debit and Open Banking payments including Variable Recurring Payments (UKPI and sweeping), and e-money.

Within that, the components sit at very different stages. Direct Debit is established and needs to perform. VRPs are at pilot, in a market that does not yet exist at scale. E-money is as much a regulatory build as a product one. Deciding what comes first, and defending that decision, is the core of the role.

Your core focus will be problem-based solving: combining deep data exploration with structured thinking to identify where merchants are underserved, set hypotheses, validate them with real merchants, and drive solutions forward to be built. Where a payment method is new to the market, the job is to hold two things together: validating demand before we commit to build, and making a deliberate strategic bet where the evidence will never be complete. We expect you to be clear about which of the two you are doing, and why.

This role requires you to act as a strategic problem-solver and hands-on validator, operating in a genuinely regulated environment: Bacs scheme rules, Open Banking standards, and the safeguarding obligations that come with holding customer funds.

Reporting to the Chief Technology Officer, who owns product and engineering, you will drive commercial outcomes, increase revenue, and support business growth through structured product excellence.

Strategy & Ownership

• Define and Own Strategy: Define and own the roadmap and product strategy across collections and e-money, ensuring alignment with Acquired's strategic priorities, framing challenges as clear, solvable product problems, and making explicit calls about sequencing between them.

• Anticipate & Adapt: Anticipate market, scheme, and regulatory change, from the commercial VRP rollout to the direction of PSD3 and wider changes in UK payments regulation.

Collections: Open Banking & VRPs

• Take VRPs to Market: Own the path from pilot to repeatable product: which merchant segments first, what has to be proven before we scale, and what would stop a merchant moving a recurring collection off Direct Debit.

• Validate Before Build: Prove merchant demand and willingness to pay for capability the market has not adopted yet, using real conversations alongside data rather than internal assumption, and say so plainly when the evidence is not there.

• Realise Value Incrementally: Find the smallest slice that puts something live and useful in front of merchants, so that a long build returns value along the way rather than only at the end.

• Own Journey Performance: Treat completion rate through the bank authorisation journey as a product problem, working with the coverage, availability and app-to-app behaviour of individual banks that we do not control.

• Measure Success: Own the A2A metrics for success, such as payment completion rate, consent activation and reuse, and pilot to live conversion, using these as validation checkpoints.

Collections: Direct Debit

• Direct Debit: Own collection performance end to end, from mandate setup through to reducing failed payments and revenue leakage.

• Investigate & Validate: Proactively dive into payment performance data, not just to report metrics, but to uncover hidden problems (e.g. return reason clusters, per-bank failure patterns, specific merchant collection behaviours) and design experiments to solve them.

• Recovery and Retries: Own how failed collections are recovered, from retry timing and dunning to the merchant-facing tooling that reduces involuntary churn

E-money

• Shape the Proposition: Define what our e-money permissions unlock commercially, from holding merchant funds through to the products that become possible once we do, and make the call on what we build first.

• Build the Foundations: Own the product side of account structure, reconciliation and safeguarding, working closely with finance, compliance and engineering on a build that is as much regulatory as it is product.

• Connect it to Collections: Identify where e-money strengthens the wider A2A proposition, such as settlement timing and funds flow.

Regulated Delivery & Partners

• Scheme and Regulatory Delivery: Own the product side of Bacs scheme rules and the Direct Debit Guarantee, and Open Banking standards.

• Partner Engagement: Work with sponsor banks, indirect access providers, Open Banking providers and Pay.UK to expand and enhance our A2A capability and identify product partnerships.

• Subject Matter Expert: Serve as the subject matter expert for account-to-account payments, providing guidance across the business and ensuring consistent, informed decision-making on foundational capabilities.

• 5+ years of product management experience, ideally within payments, fintech, or account-to-account payments.

• A2A Domain Knowledge: Strong understanding of Open Banking payment initiation and Variable Recurring Payments is what we most need. Direct Debit and Bacs, and e-money, are things we will support you to pick up, so depth in one A2A area matters more than coverage of all of them.

• Strong Analytical Acumen: Proven ability to structure complex business problems into manageable, validated product initiatives using data insights and working effectively with Data/BI teams.

• Market Validation Experience: A track record of proving demand for something customers had not adopted yet, using experimentation, merchant conversations and pre-defined metrics to validate problems and solution designs before moving into product build, alongside the judgement to know when to stop validating and take a bet.

• Comfort in a Regulated Environment: Experience working to a scheme rulebook or a regulatory permission, or clear evidence of getting on top of one quickly.

• Portfolio Prioritisation: Experience holding more than one product line at once and making defensible calls between them.

• Stakeholder Management: Influence senior stakeholders by presenting the problem being solved and the data-driven recommendation, balancing platform stability against commercial growth

Behaviours

• Problem-Solver & Validator: Focused relentlessly on structuring and solving complex merchant challenges through rigorous analysis and validation.

• Strategic: Possesses the ability to define a clear, defensible direction, including for long-term platform health and stability.

• Comfortable Creating a Market: Able to work on a product where demand is not yet proven, and to say honestly when it is not there.

• Hands-on: Willing to conduct deep-dive analysis and personally drive the solution discovery process.

• Commercially Minded: Able to link product strategy to revenue growth and profitability.

• Collaborative: Able to work effectively with technical and commercial teams.