Senior Associate Acquiring

Key Responsibilities

• Drive end-to-end rollout of NPCI products, features and ecosystem initiatives across banks, Payment Aggregators (PAs), TPAPs, issuers, acquirers and other relevant ecosystem partners.
• Work closely with Product teams and ecosystem partners to understand product requirements and translate them into clear implementation, integration and partner-readiness plans.
• Drive partner readiness across the complete implementation lifecycle, including testing, certification, pilot execution, production enablement and go-live, ensuring that dependencies and timelines are clearly tracked.
• Identify implementation bottlenecks, technical or operational dependencies and partner-level gaps, and work with internal and external stakeholders to ensure timely resolution and production readiness.
• Drive merchant acceptance and adoption of NPCI payment products, with a specific focus on the acquiring ecosystem and its ability to enable products and use cases across merchants.
• Work closely with acquiring banks, Payment Aggregators and other acquiring ecosystem participants to identify and resolve merchant acceptance, onboarding, activation, transaction enablement and usage-related gaps.
• Analyse merchant, transaction and partner-level data to identify non-acceptance, under-utilisation, drop-offs and growth opportunities across products, merchant segments and acquiring partners.
• Work with acquiring partners to develop and execute targeted action plans to improve merchant acceptance, activation, transaction volumes and overall adoption of NPCI payment products.
• Engage with acquirers and ecosystem partners to understand operational and business challenges affecting acceptance and identify opportunities for process, product or ecosystem-level interventions.
• Monitor and drive implementation of NPCI circulars, operating guidelines, branding standards, product requirements and ecosystem mandates across relevant partners.
• Coordinate ecosystem-wide migrations, product changes and other mandated initiatives, ensuring partner preparedness, implementation tracking, issue resolution and timely closure of identified gaps.
• Establish and maintain rollout, partner-readiness, merchant-acceptance and adoption MIS, using data to track progress, identify risks and provide meaningful insights to leadership.
• Prepare regular updates for senior stakeholders covering implementation status, partner performance, key gaps, risks, dependencies, escalations and proposed corrective actions.
• Identify recurring ecosystem issues and work with Product, Technology and Operations teams to convert these observations into product enhancements, process improvements or ecosystem interventions.
• Support identification and evaluation of new opportunities within the acquiring ecosystem by understanding market developments, partner capabilities, merchant requirements and emerging payment use cases.
• Manage multiple initiatives and stakeholders simultaneously, ensuring alignment across internal teams and external ecosystem participants while maintaining focus on business outcomes and committed timelines.
• Build and maintain strong working relationships with acquiring banks, Payment Aggregators, merchants and other ecosystem participants, influencing stakeholders and driving outcomes even where there is no direct reporting authority.
• Take ownership of issues from identification through resolution, ensuring that problems are not merely tracked but are actively driven to closure with measurable outcomes.
• Contribute to a culture of data-driven decision making, structured problem solving and continuous improvement within the acquiring and merchant acceptance ecosystem.