Operations Strategist

Job description

At U.S. Bank, we’re on a journey to do our best. Helping the customers and businesses we serve to make better and smarter financial decisions, enabling the communities we support to grow and succeed in the right ways, all more confidently and more often—that’s what we call the courage to thrive. We believe it takes all of us to bring our shared ambition to life, and each person is unique in their potential. A career with U.S. Bank gives you a wide, ever-growing range of opportunities to discover what makes you thrive. Try new things, learn new skills and discover what you excel at—all from Day One. As a wholly owned subsidiary of U.S. Bank, Elavon is committed to building the platforms and ecosystems that help over 1.5 million customers around the world to achieve their financial goals—no matter what they need. From transaction processing to customer service, to driving innovation and launching new products, we’re building a range of tailored payment solutions powered by the latest technology. As part of our team, you can explore what motivates and energizes your career goals: partnering with our customers, our communities, and each other. We actively uphold transparent and fair hiring practices that support individual opportunity, inclusive culture, and career mobility across all levels of our organisation. We offer meaningful opportunities for growth, a culture of inclusion, and a strong commitment to transparency and integrity in everything we do. Job Description About the Role The Operations AI Strategist will own the business strategy for applying AI and agentic decisioning across PMI Operations in Europe and North America. The remit spans merchant servicing and onboarding, disputes, AI-enabled digital self-service, client growth and retention, and transaction operations. This is a business strategy and operating-model leadership role, not an AI development role. The role holder will: Set the AI agenda and portfolio priorities for PMI Operations, linking investment decisions to customer, commercial, operational, workforce, risk, and control outcomes. Define where AI should assist, recommend, process, or decide, including the level of autonomy and human oversight. Establish the framework for safely progressing from AI-assisted to human-supervised and, where appropriate, AI-led operations. Represent the PMI Operations AI agenda in enterprise and business-line governance forums. Define how people and AI work together, including the capabilities, roles, and adoption measures required for a blended workforce. Key Responsibilities Own the AI and agentic decisioning strategy across PMI Operations, translating business priorities into a portfolio spanning merchant servicing and onboarding, disputes, digital self-service, client growth and retention, and transaction operations. Define the AI autonomy framework, including autonomy levels, confidence thresholds, approval and override rules, escalation paths, exception handling, and progression from human-led to AI-led processing. Turn operational judgment into decisioning logic, using quality findings, escalations, fallbacks, and exception patterns to refine decision rules, workflows, and the AI roadmap. Shape the AI-enabled digital self-service strategy, improving intent capture, IVR containment, deflection, and routing while protecting customer experience, retention, and commercial outcomes. Own the AI portfolio and value realization framework, defining success measures, tracking impact across revenue, retention, leakage, cost-to-serve, quality, cycle time, straight-through processing, and automation coverage, driving reuse across regions, and recommending where solutions should scale, evolve, pause, or stop. Benchmark AI against human decisioning to determine where autonomy should expand, tighten, or change based on commercial, customer, operational, and control outcomes. Champion responsible AI and lead governance, ensuring decisions remain explainable, monitored for bias and drift, audit-ready, and appropriately escalated, while guiding use cases through enterprise AI intake, compliance, inventory registry, model risk, technology, and business change processes. Define the blended human-AI operating model and workforce readiness, setting adoption expectations, clarifying how teams supervise and improve AI-enabled work, partnering with Talent and Global L&D on roles and skills, and shaping how AI-agent transactions, evidence standards, and accountability are managed in emerging workflows. Executive Leadership Profile Industry & Operational Expertise: 10+ years' experience in payments, financial operations, decisioning, strategy, or transformation within financial services, including enterprise or multi-region leadership in operational environments. AI & Decisioning Expertise: Expertise in decision science, risk-based decisioning, and applied AI, including generative AI, agentic AI, enterprise AI platforms, vendor ecosystems, and AI-enabled operational decisioning. Governance & Risk Management: Experience defining or operating AI governance, operational risk, autonomy threshold, or human-in-the-loop control frameworks, ensuring AI-enabled decisions are controlled, auditable, and aligned with regulatory and risk expectations. Awareness of emerging AI governance across EU and US desired. Strategic & Commercial Acumen: Strong commercial, analytical, and strategic judgment, with the ability to assess opportunities, evaluate value, balance risk and reward, and translate complex operational, technology, risk, and AI topics into clear business decisions and executive recommendations. Executive Influence & Stakeholder Leadership: Proven ability to influence and align senior stakeholders across Product, Technology, Risk, Compliance, and Operations, navigating governance, investment, prioritization, and implementation decisions in a matrixed environment. Transformation & Change Leadership: Demonstrated success leading enterprise transformation through influence, driving AI adoption, operating model evolution, workforce readiness, and capability development across global, matrixed organizations Business Ownership of AI Decision Outcomes: Experience acting as the business owner for AI-enabled decisioning, defining priorities, shaping roadmaps, establishing success measures, and ensuring solutions deliver commercial value while balancing customer, compliance, and control outcomes. This role requires working from a U.S. Bank location three (3) or more days per week. Accessibility We are committed to providing an inclusive and accessible recruitment experience. If you need adjustments at any stage of the application or hiring process, please contact your recruiter for guidance and support. Total Rewards U.S. Bank is committed to fair, equitable, and transparent compensation practices in line with local regulatory and legal requirements. Our total rewards approach is designed to attract, retain, and support top talent while ensuring equal pay for work of equal value. We offer a market-competitive compensation package that includes: Clearly defined salary ranges aligned with industry benchmarks and internal equity standards. Performance-based incentives for eligible employees (as defined by relevant plan rules), awarded through transparent, objective criteria that recognize both individual and company performance. Inclusive equitable benefits that are accessible to all employees and focused around our 3 main pillars of financial wellbeing, health & wellness). Continuous development opportunities including training, education support, and career progression pathways based on inclusive and transparent criteria. Employee recognition programs that celebrate achievements and milestones for all. We regularly review our compensation and benefits to ensure they remain competitive, inclusive, and responsive to employee needs and market trends. Further details of the compensation package will be provided upon application. We encourage candidates to explore the full value of our offer, including monetary and non-monetary benefits, at Employee benefits and development | U.S. Bank | Elavon . Closing Date Posting may be closed earlier due to high volume of applicants. We aim to provide timely updates throughout the process and encourage early applications to ensure consideration.