Principal Consultant – Payments recruitment

Job Summary

With a strong emphasis on business transformation, business process change and related IT change, the Principal Consultant (Payments) develops consulting services solution offerings specific to the assigned domain practice area; rolls out new offerings within the domain; identifies new business opportunities; conducts business development activities to sell the domain's consulting services to existing and new customers; provides customer solutions that introduce best practices; leads delivery and implementation of consulting services; develops thought leadership and leverages a network of senior client contacts across the domain area; and generates pull through revenue by cross-selling / up-selling related IT and BPO services leveraging a global delivery model.

At the Senior Manager (Principal Consultant) level the role holder will take responsibility for consulting business development and delivery with one or more clients, as an integral part of Cognizant's overall 'Three-in-the-box' client management model, alongside on and offshore client partners.

Key Responsibilities

With deep domain understanding of the current UK, European (and ideally Global) payments landscape (business processes, payments infrastructures and COTS solutions), the drivers for change and the future payments landscape, you will:

  1. Work with the Head of Banking and on/offshore payments domain consultants to enhance and build offerings in payments - build and qualify value proposition, point solutions or solution accelerators and frameworks
  2. Be responsible for identifying and creating opportunities for domain consulting, domain intensive projects and billability targets
  3. Be able to work with delivery teams and provide required understanding of the business / domain solution, IT implementation and guide through the realisation phase of projects
  4. Mentor, enable and manage teams of business analysts and consultants in the delivery of client engagements - leveraging local market business expertise, domain knowledge, and commercially available third party products
  5. Harvest, collateralise, and institutionalise knowledge gained through multiple engagements
  6. Work with account and sales teams to understand the opportunities with the existing clients / prospects, as well as communicate additional opportunities in payments to be actively explored / pursued, and support building the 'Go To Market' plan.
  7. Continually contribute to practice-level solutions and influence a positive feedback loop with client-level implementations
  8. Proactively develop thought leadership and contribute to Cognizant's brand
  9. Proactively participate in the development and growth of the BFS-CBC Consulting Practice
  10. Undertake line management to develop a team of consultants

As an industry-oriented thinker you will provide leadership, innovation and management, determining the best solutions necessary for resolving business-IT issues at a set of key clients.

Skills and Experience

  1. Proven track record in Retail and/or Wholesale Banking and/or Payments Services Providers in a consulting role. Consideration will also be given to operational line managers who lack consulting experience, provided they have the domain expertise required and the capability to be successful in the role. Particular areas of interest are wholesale payments and associated payments exceptions, investigations and cash management, and core retail banking payments
  2. Proven track record, domain expertise, and network of senior client contacts in payments
  3. Background / understanding of cash management, integration with corporate systems, channels, interchange formats and reporting
  4. Must have the capability to operate at multiple levels of abstraction and detail - ensure quality of deliverables and inject creativity in proposals

Knowledge

  1. Strong understanding of payments business processes and data requirements
  2. Strong understanding of the regulatory changes driving the future of payments
  3. Strong understanding of technological drivers for change in payments - such as competition, consolidation, message standards, mobile payments, mobile payment acceptance, internet payments and cloud computing
  4. Strong knowledge of current and future payments messaging standards - knowledge of messaging standards of European ACH, RTGS, SWIFT and market infrastructures is a definite plus
  5. Deep understanding of recent and upcoming change in the European payment landscape, impacts of the industry and business solutions being positioned
  6. Up to date awareness of the commercially available COTS products and technologies in the payments space is essential

Competency

  1. Strong result orientation with the ability to positively affect outcomes at client executive level.
  2. Ability to influence decisions, approaches through strong subject matter expertise, and positioning of relevant experience
  3. Ability to develop and deliver succinct and impactful presentations and written materials to communicate to a large, culturally/geographically diverse customer base
  4. Establish thought leadership position with key stakeholders and long term relationships with key clients - resulting in trusted partner status and repeatable revenue streams
  5. Ability to efficiently manage time and leverage a global team - meeting deadlines without sacrificing the quality of the services
  6. Excellent leadership, organisational, decision making and team building skills to manage geographically and internationally dispersed and matrixed teams

Other information
This is a consulting role and therefore requires the ability to travel both domestically and internationally.

Cognizant (NASDAQ: CTSH) is the fastest-growing global IT services and business process outsourcing solutions provider, headquartered in Teaneck, N.J. Cognizant's single-minded passion is to dedicate our global technology and innovation know-how, our industry expertise and worldwide resources to working together with clients to make their businesses stronger.
Today with over 50 delivery centres worldwide and over 100,000 employees as of December 31, 2010, Cognizant is a member of the NASDAQ-100, the SP 500, the Forbes Global 2000, and the Fortune 500, and is ranked among the top performing and fastest growing companies in the world.

Skills

Educated to degree level or equivalent
MBA or equivalent post-graduate qualification is preferred