Vice President, Commercial Finance & Deal Management

Job description

About Us Visa is a world leader in payments technology, facilitating transactions between consumers, merchants, financial institutions and government entities across more than 200 countries and territories, dedicated to uplifting everyone, everywhere by being the best way to pay and be paid. At Visa, you'll have the opportunity to create impact at scale — tackling meaningful challenges, growing your skills and seeing your contributions impact lives around the world. Join Visa and do work that matters – to you, to your community, and to the world. Progress starts with you. Job Description ROLE PURPOSE The role of VP Commercial Finance & Deal Management is to lead the Client Incentives Finance function across Europe, providing senior financial leadership, commercial judgement, governance oversight and strategic direction for Visa’s client incentive investments. The role partners closely with regional executives, country leadership teams, Sales, Finance, Product, Legal, and Strategy functions to support sustainable revenue growth, optimize incentive investments, and strengthen client relationships across Europe. The role is responsible for ensuring that client incentive deals are commercially viable, optimally structured, aligned to Visa Europe’s strategic priorities, and compliant with Visa’s governance requirements. This includes overseeing the financial evaluation, structuring, approval, forecasting, and performance management of complex client incentive arrangements across issuer, acquirer, co-brand, fintech, and strategic partnership portfolios. As a senior finance leader, the role leads a team of finance professionals responsible for commercial deal evaluation, financial modelling, incentive forecasting, business case development, and performance monitoring across Europe’s largest client partnerships; and is responsible for driving continuous improvements to the end-to-end deal process, including the effective utilisation of AI to drive efficiencies. The role holder will sit on the Europe Finance Leadership Team (FLT) and report to the Visa Europe CFO. KEY ACCOUNTABILITIES Lead the Finance responsibilities for the European Client Incentives portfolio, ensuring strong financial governance, commercial discipline, and strategic alignment across all significant client incentive proposals to maximise return on investment. Provide financial leadership and commercial insight on market trends, competitive dynamics, and emerging payment ecosystem developments across the full deal lifecycle, from deal inception and strategic framing through to modelling, approval, contract signing, implementation, and post-deal performance monitoring. Act as a senior subject matter expert to advise senior business leaders on the financial implications of client incentive economics, deal governance, pricing, interchange dynamics, investment appraisal, and the commercial levers available to support sustainable revenue growth. Support enterprise-level prioritisation of client incentive investments, ensuring Visa’s resources are allocated to the highest-value strategic opportunities. Oversee the financial structuring and evaluation of complex client incentive deals, ensuring proposed investments are aligned with client objectives, Visa’s growth strategy, budget parameters, enterprise-level criteria, and return expectations with appropriate balance between growth objectives, profitability targets, and risk considerations. Oversee effective scenario analysis, sensitivity testing, and portfolio analytics to determine appropriate levels of sign-on, performance-related, volume-based, strategic, or other client incentives to support business decision-making. Partner with Sales, Regional Managing Directors, Account Executives, Product, Strategy, Legal, Contract Management, Client Services, and Global Finance teams to develop robust commercial proposals and financially sound deal structures. Anticipate conflicts, risks, and trade-offs arising during deal development and prepare alternative scenarios or mitigation options to support informed decision-making. Ensure that client incentive offers are commercially compelling while safeguarding Visa’s financial, legal, regulatory, and contractual position. Ensure that all client incentive deals brought for approval are supported by robust financial analysis, clear commercial rationale and alignment with broader European and global strategic priorities and identify and mitigate commercial, financial, operational, and compliance risks associated with client agreements. Work closely with Legal and Contract Management teams to understand and apply key regulatory, contractual, accounting, and governance requirements in assessing the acceptability of proposed deal structures. Lead the preparation and review of executive-level investment appraisal materials, deal decks, financial recommendations, and governance submissions for senior management and global decision-making forums, including GPIC and other applicable approval bodies, ensuring that the Finance point of view is embedded throughout. Present financial recommendations, risks, sensitivities, and trade-offs to senior stakeholders, ensuring the Finance perspective is clearly articulated and central to investment decisions. Chair and manage governance forums (GIG and EDR) responsible for reviewing significant commercial investments. Ensure approved financial terms are accurately reflected in final contracts and that appropriate controls exist between governance approval, contract execution, and ongoing deal management. Lead portfolio-level analysis of client incentive performance, identifying opportunities to improve return on investment, optimise incentive spend, enhance client profitability, and strengthen business outcomes. Bring a portfolio lens to incentive investment decisions, using post-deal performance insight to inform future deal structures, prioritisation and resource allocation. Monitor approved deals against contractual commitments, financial assumptions, performance milestones, and strategic objectives, ensuring visibility of risks and opportunities across the incentive portfolio. Drive continuous improvement in the end-to-end client incentive processes, tools, governance standards, reporting, modelling approaches, and management information both regionally and globally effectively utilising AI to drive efficiency savings. Shape the future of deals in Europe, driving standardisation and global alignment and leading the European roll-out of the global deal tool iDeal and Deal Performance Tracking (DPT). Foster collaboration building strong relationships with senior stakeholders across Europe and globally, acting as a trusted advisor on financial strategy, investment decisions, governance matters, and client incentive performance. Maintain strong standards of financial control, accountability, documentation, and audit readiness across the client incentive governance process and support audit and regulatory requirements. Lead and develop a diverse and inclusive high-performing team of finance and commercial professionals situated in both the European and locally in the clusters, driving a culture of accountability, continuous improvement, and strategic thinking. Provide leadership, coaching, development, and direction to the team, building capability, resilience, and succession depth across the function. Qualifications ESSENTIAL QUALIFICATIONS, KNOWLEDGE AND EXPERIENCE Accountancy qualification, MBA, or equivalent senior finance experience. Educated to degree level or equivalent. Significant experience in Finance, Commercial Finance, FP&A, Deal Finance, Corporate Finance, or a related strategic finance discipline. Demonstrated expertise in the payments industry, including strong understanding of issuing, acquiring, processing, client incentives, interchange, pricing, and payment ecosystem economics. Extensive experience supporting senior commercial decision-making, preferably in a highly matrixed, multinational organisation. Strong experience leading complex financial modelling, investment appraisal, forecasting, scenario analysis, and portfolio performance management. Proven ability to evaluate complex commercial proposals and translate financial analysis into clear, actionable recommendations for senior executives. Strong commercial judgement, with the ability to balance client needs, competitive dynamics, strategic growth objectives, return expectations, and risk considerations. Demonstrated experience preparing and presenting executive-level materials for senior management, governance committees, and investment approval forums. Strong executive presence and influencing, negotiation, and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to operate effectively across Sales, Finance, Legal, Product, Strategy, and senior leadership teams. Strong understanding of governance, controls, contractual risk, financial risk, and regulatory considerations associated with major commercial agreements. Commitment to developing talent and fostering inclusion with a proven ability to lead and motivate high-performing teams in a complex and fast-moving business environment. Strong communication and interpersonal skills, including the ability to explain complex financial concepts clearly to non-finance stakeholders. High level of computer literacy, including advanced Excel and strong familiarity with financial planning, reporting, data analytics, and business intelligence tools. Strategic mindset, sound judgement, high personal accountability, and ability to manage multiple priorities across countries, clients, and stakeholders. Visa is an EEO Employer Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability or protected veteran status. Visa will also consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with EEOC guidelines and applicable local law.