Senior Product Owner — Cards, Payments, AML/KYC & Fraud

Role at a Glance:
Role - Product Owner —> Banking / Cards / AML / KYC / Fraud
Base location - India, remote. Onsite - Riyadh, Saudi Arabia — approximately 2 weeks per month
Contract - Initial 12 months, with strong potential for extension
Expenses - Visa, flights and accommodation fully arranged and paid
Engagement - Full-time contract; India business hours with overlap into Gulf hours
Reporting into - Client-side Product leadership, alongside a multi-squad delivery team
Interview - Video rounds on MS Teams, plus a face-to-face round if required
Openings - Multiple, one per product track below
Key responsibilities
• Own the product vision, roadmap and backlog for your track, and keep them defensible to both business and risk stakeholders.
• Translate regulatory, scheme and business requirements into epics, features, user stories and acceptance criteria an engineering squad can build from without re-interpretation.
• Prioritise the backlog against customer value, launch commitments, regulatory obligations and technical dependencies, and say plainly what is being traded away.
• Run requirements workshops with senior business, operations, risk and compliance stakeholders, and close open decisions rather than logging them.
• Specify integrations with third-party platforms — card processor, identity and KYC vendors, screening providers, fraud risk management engines, core banking — including data contracts, failure handling and reconciliation.
• Work daily with engineering, architecture, UX, QA and delivery through the full lifecycle, from discovery to release.
• Make sure what ships satisfies regulatory, security, data-residency and operational requirements, with the evidence trail to show it.
• Manage dependencies across squads and vendors, and surface slippage early with a stated fallback.
• Define and drive UAT, scheme certification where applicable, launch readiness and post-launch iteration.
• Build the operational side alongside the product: runbooks, queue design, SLAs, MIS and the reporting operations and compliance teams will depend on.
• Act as the bridge between banking subject-matter experts and the delivery team, in both directions.
Experience required
• 8+ years in banking, payments or financial services, with at least 4 years as a Product Owner or Senior Product Owner.
• Proven delivery of complex digital banking or banking transformation programmes, including at least one product taken from definition to live.
• Deep domain depth in at least one of the four tracks above — depth in one beats familiarity with all four.
• Demonstrable command of the detail in your track. For cards, that means product construct, limits, fees, settlement and disputes; for AML/KYC, risk-based CDD/EDD, screening and alert disposition; for fraud, rule design, thresholds and false-positive economics.
• Strong track record owning and prioritising a backlog in an Agile or Scrum environment, working directly with engineering and QA.
• Excellent story and acceptance-criteria writing — unambiguous enough that a squad in a different time zone can build from it.
• Experience on regulated, compliance-driven programmes, with exposure to auditors, regulators or internal risk functions.
• Confidence engaging senior business and technology stakeholders, including the ability to hold a position under pressure and be specific about risk.
• Experience on large-scale programmes in banks, fintechs or financial institutions, working alongside vendors and system integrators.
• Excellent written and spoken English, and strong facilitation and workshop skills.
• Willing and able to travel to Riyadh for approximately two weeks per month, with a valid passport and no constraint on obtaining a Saudi visa.
Highly desirable
• Preferred Experience: Exposure to cards and payments, including digital banking journeys.
• Added Advantage: Experience in AML/KYC processes, customer onboarding, fraud detection, and transaction monitoring.
• Prior work with a digital bank, challenger bank or neobank launch, rather than only an incumbent's transformation.
• Experience delivering in Saudi Arabia or the wider GCC, and comfort working with SAMA-regulated entities and local scheme and identity requirements.
• Hands-on exposure to card issuing and processing platforms, and to Visa or Mastercard scheme rules, mandates and certification.
• Experience integrating a third-party fraud risk management or decisioning platform, and owning the rules in it after go-live.
• Working knowledge of FATF-aligned AML/CFT frameworks, sanctions screening and regulatory reporting obligations.
• Familiarity with modern banking architecture — APIs, microservices, event-driven design and cloud deployment — enough to challenge a design without needing to write the code.
• Experience within a global consulting or digital transformation environment, delivering to a client rather than an internal sponsor.
• Relevant certifications, such as CSPO or PSPO, CAMS, or a card-scheme or dispute-management credential.
• Arabic language ability is a bonus, not a requirement.
Engagement, travel and selection
Engagement. Initial 12-month contract with strong potential for a longer-term engagement. You can be based anywhere in India, but the Riyadh travel pattern is a condition of the role, not a preference.
Travel. Approximately two weeks in Riyadh each calendar month, with the remainder worked remotely from India. Visa processing, flights and accommodation are arranged and paid for. Expect the onsite weeks to carry the workshops, stakeholder decisions and launch milestones.
To apply. Send a CV that states, for each track you are claiming, what you personally owned and what went live. Please also confirm that you have not authorized any other agency to represent you for this role in the past three months, as duplicate representation will stop an application.

Work arrangement
Yes