Payment Acceptance Support & Improvements Analyst - INTERNAL ONLY

Job id: 086868. Salary: £37,332 per annum, including London Weighting Allowance.

Posted: 27 March 2024. Closing date: 12 April 2024.

Business unit: FPSPA. Department: Income Services.

Contact details:Spencer Pritchard. [email protected]

Location: Lavington Street. Category: Professional & Support Services.

This Payment Acceptance Support & Improvements Analyst position is an exciting newly created role within the Income Services section to help fill an existing support and resilience gap in relation to the King’s payment acceptance landscape. As the position is a new role, there will be scope for the role holder to help develop it over time into what will be an important position. 

The role will provide a broad range of cross functional front-line support for the wide range of mainly (but not limited to) online card transaction payment acceptance channels, that are supported from within the Income Services section. 

King’s has a varying range of card payment activities with many moving parts and the role holder will be expected to become a subject matter expert (SME) in all parts of the various processes, taking into account the different stakeholders (paying customers, internal business stakeholders, IT integrations support, third party service providers). 

As well as becoming an SME in payment acceptance, the role holder will be expected to ensure processes are as efficient as they can be and is tasked with proactively looking to improve where existing processes or setups are sub-optimal, with consideration being given to the automating of manually driven processes that could be improved upon. 

The role holder will troubleshoot for, and support the various associated King's lead business areas of online payment acceptance pathways and assist with the processing of refunds as and when required. They will also be an additional conduit with the multitude of service providers at play. They will be expected to triage and be the initial point of contact for dealing with any incidents that may occur. The role holder will be expected to review existing user guides and training materials for both internal and external users and to enhance the current offering whatever the output method e.g webpages, SharePoint, Teams etc. 

The role holder will support and assist in the testing and implementation of any new pathways, integrations, systems and any new online processes or enhanced payment methods brought into play or offered, as well as supporting with any new third-party service providers engaged with. The role holder will need to ensure reconciliations and reporting are given the attention needed to ensure King’s is receiving all income due and that there aren’t any discrepancies between the various reporting areas, with the ultimate aim of introducing 3-way reconciliations. 

Reporting to the Deputy Head of Income Services within the Income Services team, this role will work as part of a team supporting this service and so may be asked to work across the service’s activities and occasionally support the work of the wider Income Services team. 

This post will be offered on an indefinite contract.

This is a full-time post.

THIS VACANCY IS OPEN TO INTERNAL APPLICANTS ONLY.

The role holder will be responsible for:

Supporting:

• Learning about and becoming an SME (subject matter expert) in all elements of the various card payment acceptance channels within King’s supported by Income Services, including the eStore
• The maintaining and provision of support to the online payment pathways supported, troubleshooting and assisting the associated King's business area owners of each pathway
• Providing an excellent frontline customer service to both internal and external customers, assisting with refunds and transactional enquiries as and when required to
• Ensuring the smooth running of all the pathways and once up to speed, the role holder will become the first line conduit with the various third-party service providers involved
• The role holder will be the initial issue solver and triage point of any incident and will assist with incident responses

Process Improvements:

• Constantly and proactively looking to drive process improvements and gain efficiencies, looking to automate existing manual processes, and behaviours where possible
• Understanding payer and transactional data and look to improve successful payment acceptance rates (in turn reducing decline rates) and payer experience, making use of relevant analytics (e.g Google Analytics) where possible, to understand user journeys and potential pain points
• Actively partake in change management where new offerings are utilised including communications and testing of any new online processes or integrations, supporting changes to pathways, as enhancements or new payment options, models arise and become available and/or as third-party suppliers change
• Encouraging and professionally pushing third-party service providers to continue to deliver more and not simply stand still with their existing product offering(s)
• Similarly raise tickets for issues with third-party service providers, log and monitor for resolution of and push for understanding of root cause of issue to ensure the same issue cannot happen again
• Proactively investigate and research new payment initiatives that King’s could look to utilise and make use of supplier related offerings e.g customer success reviews and payment acceptance scorecard

Reporting & Reconciliations:

• The creation of digestible reports and dashboards that use the available data from multiple sources that can assist in analysing our data, bringing to life performance and transactional trends and flagging areas of concerns; whilst exploring ways of better presenting the data through such tools as Power BI, thus giving colleagues the information needed to continually innovate and improve
• Consideration of ways to improve fraudulent transaction rules and scanning to assist with reduction of potential fraud and chargebacks
• Ensuring that the reconciliation of transactional entries is at the forefront of thinking to ensure that King’s has the assurance that the correct monies are being taking and that the relevant reporting data, no matter what the reporting system, accurately reflects the facts, potentially by way of a 3 way match
• Supporting and monitoring of the various daily transaction accounting files to ensure the correct loading into the King’s finance system and dealing with any discrepancies flushed out as part of the main bank reconciliation process

Training & Housekeeping:

• Ensuring the mapping of existing payment acceptance channels, in what is an ever/constantly evolving payments environment, are maintained and kept up to date and remain fit for purpose
• Maintaining of user segmented access groups for the various third-party reporting portals in use
• User setup of reporting access for approved users to self-sufficiently run their own reports
• Creating, editing and upkeep of relevant online payment acceptance user guides, process documentation and for the creation, maintaining and upkeep of webpages / SharePoint / Teams sites
• Ensuring regular stakeholder engagement and communications around the provision of user training guides and knowledge articles, providing structured user training as required
• Regular housekeeping of existing setups and all associated process parts to ensure everything advertised to customers and payers remains current and fit for purpose
• Monitor the various online payment related email helpdesk accounts and deal with and respond to queries as they arise

Compliance:

• Ensuring any card data is handled in line with Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) procedures and become an additional “PCI DSS Champion”, supporting Income Services in monitoring the application of these rules in other King’s business areas through the nature of the role
• Helping to support and implement compliance requirements including but not limited to Anti Money Laundering (AML), sanctions checking and due diligence, as King’s looks to strive for best practice
• Ensure personal data is handled in line with Data Protection Legislation / General Data Protection Regulation

General:

• Demonstrate strong communication, customer service and presentation skills and be able to deal with a wide range of staff no matter their seniority, and other key stakeholders
• Keeping up to date with changes in the HE (Higher Education) sector, service discipline and university in general that may impact on the role - be proactive in staying up to date with best practice and trends
• Play an active part in the Financial Services community and demonstrate a commitment to change, improvement and development both as an individual and in the provision of services to the university and outside stakeholders
• This role will demonstrate the King’s commitment to Equality, Diversity & Inclusion to empower everyone to participate and contribute fully to the university
• The above list of responsibilities may not be exhaustive, and the post holder will be required to undertake such tasks and responsibilities as may reasonably be expected within the scope and grading of the post

The above list of responsibilities may not be exhaustive, and the post holder will be required to undertake such tasks and responsibilities as may reasonably be expected within the scope and grading of the post.

Essential criteria

Desirable criteria