Vice President, Accounting

PayNearMe is a rapidly growing enterprise payments platform that helps businesses collect and disburse funds across a broad range of payment types and channels. We process more than $50 billion annually for clients across consumer lending, gaming, tolling, financial institutions, and other complex, highly regulated markets.

As our transaction volume, payment capabilities, and client requirements continue to grow, we are building a money movement and accounting organization capable of scaling significantly while delivering greater accuracy, stronger controls, faster issue resolution, and less manual work.

The Opportunity

PayNearMe is seeking a Vice President of Accounting to lead three closely connected functions:

1. The accounting, reconciliation, and controls required to demonstrate that every dollar moved as intended and was completely and accurately recorded. 
2. The day-to-day operational movement of client funds, including settlement, disbursements, prefunding, FBO accounts, and exceptional or manual transactions.
3. Ensure timely, accurate, and GAAP-compliant monthly, quarterly, and annual financial statements.

This executive will be accountable for the integrity of PayNearMe’s financials and end-to-end funds flows. PayNearMe’s systems handle the processing of billions of $ of payments and this role will ensure that all payments and disbursements are all settled properly and that they are accounted for accurately.

This is not a Product role. Product and Engineering will design and build the platform, ledgering capabilities, integrations, and automation that move money. This leader will define the financial and operational requirements, operate the resulting system, identify control or scalability gaps, and certify that client funds and accounting records are accurate.

The position reports to the Chief Financial Officer and will partner closely with Product, Engineering, Finance, Risk, Compliance, Legal, Client Operations, and external banks, processors, payment networks, and auditors.

Responsibilities:

Corporate and Payments Accounting

• Lead PayNearMe’s Accounting organization, including general ledger, close and consolidation, revenue and transaction accounting, invoicing where required, accounts payable, payroll accounting, technical accounting, and financial reporting.
• Ensure timely, accurate, and GAAP-compliant monthly, quarterly, and annual financial statements.
• Own the accounting treatment for payments, disbursements, fees, processor costs, refunds, returns, chargebacks, reserves, client liabilities, revenue sharing, and other transaction-related activity.
• Ensure that transaction-level activity flows accurately from operational systems and subledgers into the general ledger.
• Maintain clear accounting policies for new products, payment types, contractual arrangements, and complex or unusual transactions.
• Manage the external audit and provide complete, accurate, and timely support for financial, bank-partner, client, and regulatory examinations.
• Build and maintain a scalable internal-control environment covering financial reporting, client funds, system access, manual adjustments, approvals, and segregation of duties.
• Partner with Tax, Legal, Compliance, and Risk on regulatory reporting, money-transmitter requirements, safeguarding obligations, and other matters involving client funds.

Money Movement Operations

• Oversee daily settlement and disbursement activity across ACH, card, cash, wire, real-time payments, and other existing or emerging payment rails.
• Manage FBO, custodial, settlement, prefund, disbursement, exception, and other client-funds accounts.
• Oversee manual money movements, including prefund transfers, settlement adjustments, account reallocations, failed-payment corrections, and exceptional client disbursements.
• Establish rigorous maker/checker controls so that no individual can initiate, approve, account for, and reconcile the same movement.
• Establish clear operating procedures, cutoff times, service levels, approval limits, escalation thresholds, and contingency processes.
• Lead the operational response to settlement failures, bank or processor discrepancies, delayed disbursements, unexpected account balances, and other client-funds incidents.
• Ensure new payment products, rails, processors, and client funds flows are operationally ready before launch.

Payment Reconciliation and Ledgering

• Own reconciliation across PayNearMe’s transaction systems and subledgers, processor and collector records, bank and FBO accounts, client balances, and general ledger.
• Reconcile client funds held in bank and FBO accounts to corresponding client-funds liabilities and transaction-level subledger records.
• Establish a complete accounting trail for all automated and manual money movements.
• Oversee settlement, prefund, suspense, receivable, payable, and exception accounts.
• Require root-cause analysis for recurring breaks and ensure that Product and Engineering address systemic causes rather than relying on continued manual correction.
• Produce reporting that identifies reconciled balances, unresolved differences, aged exceptions, manual movements, control failures, and emerging financial risks.
• Certify regularly that client-funds balances are complete, accurate, appropriately segregated, and supported by the underlying records.

Systems, Automation, and Scale

• Partner closely with the Product leader responsible for Money Movement while maintaining clear accountability: Product owns what the platform should do; this role owns whether the financial and operational outcomes are correct.
• Define the target operating model for money movement, reconciliation, exception management, and payments accounting.
• Translate Finance and Operations requirements into clear product, data, ledger, and workflow requirements for Product and Engineering.
• Drive automation of settlement processing, reconciliation, exception categorization, approvals, journal creation, financial reporting, and control evidence.
• Build systems and processes capable of supporting substantially greater transaction volume, additional products, more payment rails, and increased regulatory complexity without proportional headcount growth.
• Use data, analytics, and AI appropriately to improve matching, identify anomalies, investigate exceptions, and reduce repetitive manual work while preserving explainability and human oversight.

Leadership and Organizational Development

• Build, lead, and develop high-performing Money Movement Operations, Payment Reconciliation, and Accounting teams.
• Develop strong leaders.
• Create a culture of accuracy, urgency, transparency, continuous improvement, and proactive escalation.
• Ensure the organization can respond effectively to time-sensitive settlement issues while also investing in systemic improvements.
• Communicate complex funds-flow, accounting, and control issues clearly to executive leadership, clients, bank partners, auditors, and the Board.

Qualifications:

• 12–15+ years of progressive experience across payments accounting, controllership, financial operations, banking operations, treasury operations, or payment reconciliation.
• Significant leadership experience within a FinTech, payment processor, financial institution, marketplace, money transmitter, card program, or other high-volume money-movement business.
• Demonstrated ownership of complex client-funds flows, including collections, settlement, FBO or custodial accounts, prefunding, disbursements, refunds, returns, and exceptions.
• Strong knowledge of ACH, card networks, wires, real-time payments, checks, cash networks, and other payment methods.
• Deep understanding of payment processing, clearing, settlement, reconciliation, subledgers, general ledgers, and customer-funds liabilities.
• Experience leading a corporate Accounting or Controllership organization, including close, financial reporting, technical accounting, audit, and internal controls.
• Strong understanding of GAAP and the accounting implications of payment transactions, processor activity, client-funds obligations, reserves, and revenue-sharing arrangements.
• Experience designing maker/checker controls, approval authorities, system permissions, reconciliation controls, and auditable manual-adjustment processes.
• Proven ability to identify control gaps and operational risks and then work with Product, Engineering, and Data teams to build scalable solutions.
• Experience implementing or materially improving reconciliation platforms, transaction subledgers, ERP integrations, treasury or banking systems, and workflow automation.
• Strong data orientation; comfortable investigating transaction-level activity and working with large datasets. SQL or comparable analytical fluency is highly desirable.
• Experience supporting external audits, bank-partner reviews, regulatory examinations, and financial-control testing.
• CPA strongly preferred. An equivalent combination of accounting expertise and deep payments-operations leadership will be considered.
• Bachelor’s degree in Accounting, Finance, Business, or a related field; advanced degree preferred.