Senior Project Manager - Payments
Description
Senior Project Manager
Job Title: Senior Project Manager - Payments
Team Location: Amsterdam, the Netherlands
About Us: At Booking.com, data drives our decisions. Technology is at our core. And innovation is everywhere. But our company is more than datasets, lines of code or A/B tests. We’re the thrill of the first night in a new place. The excitement of the next morning. The friends you encounter. The journeys you take. The sights you see. And the memories you make. Through our products, partners and people, we make it easier for everyone to experience the world.
Order to Cash (O2C), within Finance and FinTech, manages the financial lifecycle with accommodation partners—from invoicing and payouts to receivables collection, cash allocation and revenue operations. Global Finance Analytics provides horizontal analytics and data science support across O2C, helping teams improve partner outcomes, operational effectiveness and financial performance.
Job Summary
The Senior Project Manager – Payments independently leads complex, cross-functional payments projects within Finance, from problem definition and business case development through implementation, operational handover and benefits measurement.
The role focuses on changes to payment and partner payout processes, payment models, operational capabilities and supporting systems. Projects may include introducing or expanding payout models, enabling market rollouts, improving payment operations and reconciliation, and strengthening exception handling, recovery processes and financial controls. The objective is to deliver scalable payments capabilities that improve partner experience, operational efficiency and financial integrity.
Working across Finance (Order to Cash/Payments, Accounting, Treasury, Tax), FinTech (Product & SAP) and relevant business units, the Senior Project Manager translates business needs into clear delivery plans and drives execution across organisational boundaries. They bring structure to ambiguity, challenge assumptions, secure stakeholder commitments and ensure that decisions reflect business value, operational readiness and risk.
This is a senior delivery role, not solely a coordination or reporting position. The role is accountable for integrated project delivery and for making ownership, dependencies and decisions explicit; functional and technical teams retain accountability for their specialist designs, approvals and deliverables.
As a secondary responsibility, the role supports the Program Management function in maintaining consistent portfolio governance, reporting and dependency management across Finance Order to Cash & Accounting.
Key Responsibilities
End-to-end ownership of payments projects
Independently lead high-complexity, business-critical payments initiatives from discovery and scoping through execution, rollout, stabilisation and closure.
Define the problem, intended outcomes, scope boundaries and delivery approach with sponsors and functional owners; assess options and recommend a practical implementation strategy.
Ensure changes address the end-to-end payment flow and downstream Finance and operational impacts, rather than optimising individual workstreams in isolation.
Project initiation and integrated planning
Develop project charters and business cases with clear objectives, measurable success criteria, expected benefits, assumptions, resource needs and cost estimates where applicable.
Translate business, operational and technical requirements into an integrated delivery plan covering workstreams, milestones, critical-path dependencies, accountable owners and acceptance criteria.
Secure delivery commitments across teams, validate capacity and sequencing, and align plans with FinTech and other teams’ roadmaps and planning cycles.
Execution, risk and dependency management
Drive delivery against agreed scope, timelines, quality and budget where applicable; hold workstream owners accountable for commitments and actively resolve impediments.
Maintain an actionable view of risks, assumptions, issues and dependencies, with named owners, mitigations and escalation triggers.
Challenge unrealistic plans, anticipate cross-team impacts and propose recovery actions when delivery is at risk.
Assess scope changes and present the implications for value, cost, timing and risk, securing the appropriate decisions before rebaselining plans.
Governance and senior stakeholder management
Establish proportionate governance with clear sponsorship, decision rights, responsibilities, working groups and escalation routes.
Lead project and steering forums that resolve issues and secure decisions; maintain clear decision and action logs.
Communicate concise, evidence-based updates to senior stakeholders, including Senior Managers and Directors, distinguishing progress from risks, trade-offs and decisions required.
Build alignment across Finance, FinTech and business stakeholders, constructively challenge competing priorities and secure agreement on shared outcomes.
Payments operational readiness and implementation
Coordinate assessment of impacts on payout execution, reconciliation, accounting, cash management, exception handling, recovery and controls with the relevant functional owners.
Ensure business and operational requirements are reflected in solution design and testing; coordinate business validation and user acceptance testing with clear ownership and acceptance criteria.
Lead readiness planning across processes, systems, people, controls, reporting and support, ensuring that residual risks and manual workarounds are understood and accepted by the appropriate owners.
Coordinate pilots, phased rollouts and cutover plans, with go/no-go criteria, contingency arrangements and accountable decision-makers.
Drive post-launch stabilisation and issue resolution, followed by documented handover to business-as-usual owners, including procedures, training, support arrangements and outstanding actions.
Outcomes, change management and continuous improvement
Agree baseline measures and target outcomes with business owners, and track delivery and benefits beyond launch.
Select relevant measures for each project, such as payout timeliness and accuracy, reconciliation exceptions, manual processing effort, operational incidents, financial exposure and partner impact.
Lead stakeholder impact assessments, communication and adoption planning so that teams can operate the new capabilities effectively.
Complete project closure and lessons learned, and translate findings into improvements to delivery practices and operational processes.
Portfolio contribution
Support the Program Management function with consistent project standards, portfolio reporting and visibility of resource constraints, risks and cross-project dependencies.
Identify conflicts, synergies and sequencing opportunities across payments and broader Finance O2C initiatives, and provide evidence-based recommendations for prioritisation.
Communication
Own department and project teams: continuous collaboration, accountability, alignment and problem-solving.
Other departments and business units: frequent engagement on requirements, delivery commitments, dependencies and decisions.
Sponsors and leadership stakeholders: regular governance updates and targeted escalation of material risks and trade-offs.
Knowledge and Skills
Education and experience
Bachelor’s degree.
5–8 years of relevant project management experience, with demonstrated independent ownership of complex, cross-functional initiatives through implementation and operational handover.
Demonstrated experience delivering payments-related projects involving payment operations, partner or merchant payouts, settlement, reconciliation or related financial processes.
Experience working across Finance, operational and technology teams in a large, international organisation.
Core capabilities
Strong command of project planning, governance, risk and dependency management, change control, resource planning and benefits tracking.
Working understanding of end-to-end payment flows and their operational and financial implications; able to translate specialist input into clear requirements, risks and delivery decisions.
Ability to lead multidisciplinary project teams and influence senior stakeholders without relying on formal authority.
Strong analytical judgement: uses quantitative and qualitative evidence to evaluate options, challenge assumptions and make recommendations.
Clear written and verbal communication, strong workshop facilitation and the ability to turn complex topics into actionable decisions.
Ability to operate with limited supervision, manage ambiguity and competing priorities, and remain hands-on in resolving delivery problems.
Preferred experience
Experience with global payments rollouts, changes to payment or payout models, or payment operations transformation.
Familiarity with Finance O2C processes and the interfaces between payments, Treasury, Accounting, Tax and Risk.
Experience delivering change alongside Product and Engineering teams using Agile or hybrid delivery approaches.
Experience with Jira and Confluence; PMP, Agile project management or equivalent certification.
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