Lifecycle Management - BPL (Located in Pune or Gurugram)

Job description

The **Director,** **Head of India Onboarding and KYC Operations - BPL** (based in Pune (preferred) or Gurugram) is accountable for leading the Onboarding, KYC Refresh, Remediation and Quality functions for BPL based in India. The role holder will own and simplify the complex operating model covering c.250 FTE across four locations and two external vendors. The role owns the build and ongoing performance of the onboarding operating model, ensuring merchants are onboarded efficiently, compliantly, and with a consistently high-quality experience that accelerates time-to-revenue. The role will also oversee the ongoing performance of KYC refresh activity (standard and high risk) and significant KYC remediation activity, ensuring activity is performed efficiently, compliantly, with excellent quality and cost performance. Operationally land the significant technology and process change driven by the Return To Satisfactory programme and large-scale transformation agenda for the BPL organisation. **Key Responsibilities** Strategy & Operating Model - Define and own the operating model for India Onboarding and KYC Operations. - Establish clear ownership, governance, service levels, and escalation paths across the onboarding, refresh and remediation journeys performed in India sites and by vendors. Organisation Design & Leadership - Design, build, and lead the India Onboarding and KYC organisation, including role design, skills, capacity, and sourcing strategy (internal and external). - Create a strong leadership team and culture focused on delivery excellence, accountability, and continuous improvement. - Define and maintain clear engagement models with Sales, Risk, Compliance, Operations, Product, and Technology. Delivery & Operational Performance - Own operational delivery performance across all merchant segments, ensuring consistent execution against agreed SLAs and KRIs. - Drive improvements in onboarding, refresh and remediation cycle times, quality, predictability and efficiency. - Ensure onboarding, refresh and remediation processes are robust, scalable, and compliant with regulatory and control requirements. - Champion automation and tooling to reduce manual effort and improve merchant and colleague experience. Risk Partnership - Act as the lead for KYC remediation activity, partnering with Financial Crime to define remediation approaches and ensure they are operationally viable - Own and deliver the remediation plans, defining MI required to oversee and govern populations and reporting to senior risk management as required **Scope** The role provides SRE enablement across Technology Operations, with an initial emphasis on Q3 launch readiness for priority services, including Next Generation Gateway and Service Portal. The scope includes designing and establishing the foundational SRE capability, reliability standards, service telemetry, SLO / SLI definition, alert hygiene, operational readiness, runbook quality, automation opportunities, incident learning and reliability improvement planning across both internally managed and provider-delivered services. The role is not accountable for feature delivery, application support ownership or the operation of a traditional production support function. Engineering will remain accountable for service ownership and recovery under the “you build it, you run it” model; the SRE Lead will enable consistent reliability practice, assure readiness and drive systemic service improvement. **Key Deliverables** - Operational readiness and successful landing of all planned technology/procedural change linked to Payments Return To Satisfactory programme - Define and execute the target operating model for India Onboarding and KYC Operations department - Oversight and accountability for the successful planning and execution of all remediation activity and populations - Delivery of green SLA/KRI performance for all activity processed by India Onboarding and KYC Operations - Own and deliver the optimisation roadmap and efficiency targets for India Onboarding and KYC Operations **Essential Experience** - Significant Onboarding and KYC operational leadership experience, with specific experience in FinTech or E-Pay / Payment Acquiring is a must - Proven experience of target operating model and location strategy design and implementation - Strong understanding of KYC and financial crime requirements for UK and European markets - Strong understanding of customer journeys and client sectors across SME and Corp - Demonstrable experience of process optimisation through process improvement / technology enhancements - Significant experience in operational management disciplines driving performance enhancements across quality, cost, delivery and customer experience - Able to translate complex financial crime issues into clear operational risk, service impact and executive-ready recommendations. - This is a Pune or Gurugram based position and is not eligible for visa sponsorship or relocation support. Applicants must already hold the legal right to work in this location and live there. - This role is intended for candidates who are already operating at Director level. - Advanced knowledge of KYC and AML requirements for UK and European activity - Ability to design and establish new operating capabilities in a greenfield or scale-up environment, translating strategic intent into practical standards, governance, routines, tooling requirements, operational processes and measurable outcomes. - Strong appreciation of operational resilience, control, auditability, regulatory expectations and supplier accountability within a modern fintech technology environment. - Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to convert technical reliability issues into clear operational risk, service impact, investment choices and executive-ready recommendations. Barclays’ payments acceptance business