Senior Specialist: Investment and Trading (Payments Processing) at Absa Group Limited (Absa)

Job Summary

Generic Summary 

• To provide investment advice and support in practice formulation and associated best practice improvement tactics; enabling the provision of specialist investment analysis expertise.
• Authorisations Specialist Role in Consumer Issuing
• An exciting role that focuses on creating efficiencies around payment authorisations.
• The Authorisations process is critical for the functioning of credit and debit cards. Efficient authorisations enable the customer experience for card users using their cards to transact at a physical point of sale or online (e-commerce) sites. It provides the Issuer with an opportunity to approve or reject card transactions either due to insufficient funds to manage credit risk or fraud. The Authorisations function requires in-depth understanding of the Card systems environment from an Issuing and Acquiring point of view to enable management of exceptions and to identify root causes of authorization failures in order to resolve customer queries and complaints and industry incidents. 
• This role will be focused on managing existing authorisations processes, incidents and resolving queries and complaints. It is complementary to the existing role of the Authorisations specialist which is currently focused on Authorisations improvements to ensure compliance to industry and schemes mandates and improve risk management, operational efficiency and the customer experience.

Job Description

Generic Job Description

• Business Management: Coordinate efforts of different operational areas under management to deliver efficient optimised operations and maximisation of value | Risk and Control: Ensure that processes, control requirements and risk management frameworks that impact the area are documented and understood | Business Performance: Set annual financial targets for the business areas and drive achievements of those targets | Client Service: Ensure that client experience and expectations are of the highest quality
• Authorisation Specialist in Consumer Issuing

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Analyse operational reports for authorisations to identify exceptions, carry out root cause analysis and resolve the identified issues causing the exceptions
• Receive and be the first point of escalation for customer queries and complaints relating to authorisations for debit and credit cards
• Log risk events as required for tracking and resolution of operational risk issues
• Communicate with the technology teams, product teams, customer service teams, fraud strategy, risk and compliance, payments and finance teams to raise and resolve authorisations issues.
• Work with the Product and technology team to ensure efficiency and effectiveness in the authorisations function by performing analysis to assess the need for any requested changes as well as their potential impact.
• Provide subject matter expertise for new products, enhancements and any projects and initiatives which impact the authorisations function.
• Ensure that colleagues and third parties are familiar with all business processes and policies impacting on the authoriations functions including Card Schemes bulletins.
• Measure and monitor the authorisation issues in terms of number of exceptions, root cause analysis and themes, losses and write-offs, produce reports and makes recommendations
• Provide market intelligence and periodic competitor analysis i.e. bench-marking with other industry players in terms of authorisations incidents and provide recommendations on required system and process changes to ensure that Absa Card remains competitive in terms of authorisations performance.
• Participate in the Card Issuing Risk forum and provide updates on risk events and issues impacting on authorisations.
• Work with the Payments team and industry representatives as well as legal and compliance colleagues to ensure that the authorisations function enables Absa to comply with relevant legislation, rules, regulations and industry standards.

Education

• Bachelor`s Degrees and Advanced Diplomas: Business, Commerce and Management Studies (Required)