Senior Manager - Credit Cards Partnerships and Schemes

JOB TITLE: Senior Manager - Credit Cards Partnerships and Schemes

LOCATION: Chester or Manchester

HOURS: Full-time

Working pattern: Our work style is hybrid, which involves spending at least two days per week, or 40% of your time, at one of our offices mentioned above.

What you’ll be doing

This is an opportunity to shape and lead the partnerships and schemes strategy behind one of the UK’s largest credit card portfolios, driving real commercial impact and customer value.

As a Senior Manager in our Unsecured Lending team, you’ll take full ownership of credit card partnerships and card scheme relationships (Visa and Mastercard), with accountability for P&L performance, partner delivery and strategic investment of scheme funding. Sitting at the heart of a highly visible, commercially critical area, you’ll play a key role in strengthening our external partnerships while ensuring governance, compliance and operational delivery at scale.

You’ll lead the end-to-end lifecycle of co-brand partnerships, from identifying and selecting partners through to structuring deals, negotiating commercial terms and managing ongoing performance. Alongside this, you’ll develop and grow merchant partnerships that enhance our propositions, deepen customer engagement and drive sustainable spend growth.

Working closely with card schemes, you’ll shape long-term strategic relationships, manage commercial negotiations and ensure the business remains compliant with all scheme requirements, including delivery of mandatory changes.

You’ll provide strong financial oversight across partnership portfolios, including forecasting, MI and performance tracking, while leading and developing a high-performing team in a complex, matrixed environment.

Why join us?

We’re transforming at pace. Investing billions in our people, data and technology to change the way we meet the needs of our customers. We’re growing, and we’d love you to be part of the journey.

Essential Skills

• 7+ years extensive experience in credit cards, co-brand partnerships and card schemes (Visa and Mastercard), within a financial services or payments environment

• Strong track record of leading co-brand partnerships end-to-end, including structuring deals, commercial negotiation, contracting and performance management

• Experience of P&L ownership, financial planning and delivering against commercial targets

• Strong understanding of governance, regulatory requirements and operational delivery within a regulated financial services environment

• Proven ability to interpret complex external requirements (e.g. scheme rules, regulatory changes) and translate these into clear business and customer outcomes

• Experience leading or developing high-performing teams within a matrixed organisation

Desirable Skills

• Experience within payments or wider card schemes environments beyond core credit cards

• Strong senior stakeholder management and influencing skills across internal and external partners

• Experience delivering large-scale, cross-functional transformation or partnership initiatives

We know that great talent comes from many backgrounds. Whilst this job advert may reference specific years of experience, we recognise that skills are developed in many ways, so if you have relevant, transferable experience, we encourage you to apply.

This is a place for you

Our ambition is to be the leading UK business for diversity, equity and inclusion supporting our customers, colleagues and communities, and we’re committed to creating an environment in which everyone can thrive, learn and develop. We provide reasonable adjustments throughout the recruitment process to reduce or remove barriers. Just let us know what you need.

We offer a wide‑ranging benefits package, including:

• A generous pension contribution of up to 15%

• An annual performance‑related bonus

• Share schemes including free shares

• Benefits you can tailor to your lifestyle, such as discounted shopping

• 30 days’ holiday, plus bank holidays

• A range of wellbeing initiatives and generous parental leave policies

Ready for a career where you can have a positive impact as you learn, grow and thrive? Apply today and find out more!