Head of Merchant Success

Type: Full-time

Function: Commercial / Merchant Success

Experience: 8–12 years (payments, merchant-facing)

Reports to: CEO---

About HitPay

HitPay is the payments and financial-operations platform for small and medium businesses across Southeast Asia. Tens of thousands of merchants in Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines use us to accept payments (cards, PayNow, QR, e-wallets, links and invoices), run point-of-sale and terminals, send payouts, and manage recurring billing — with bill pay and multi-currency accounts launching next. We're a Major Payment Institution licensed by the Monetary Authority of Singapore.

We've built a large, growing book of merchants. This role exists to make sure we keep and grow it.

Why this role exists

Most of the energy at a payments company goes into acquiring new merchants. Far less goes into the revenue we already have — and in payments, the existing book is where the durable margin lives. Today no single person is accountable for the commercial health of that book: for getting to at-risk accounts before they leave, for winning back the ones who lapsed, for growing the ones who stayed, and — critically — for being the commercial voice in the room when we're deciding whether to hold or release a good merchant's account.

You will own all of that. You are the commercial owner of the existing book and the internal counterweight who ensures we don't lose good merchants to avoidable friction — while working hand-in-glove with Compliance, never against them.

This is a senior, high-trust, individual-contributor-first role with a clear path to build a team behind you as the motion proves out.

What you'll own

1. Commercial counterweight on account actions.

When we're about to pause, hold, or freeze an account above a materiality threshold, the commercial decision runs through you — either your sign-off, or a joint decision with Compliance under an agreed SLA. The line is clean: Compliance holds an absolute veto on genuine AML and fraud concerns, and you respect it. You arbitrate the commercial cases — collections, negative balances, settlement holds pending documents, RFI chases — where the question is not "is this criminal?" but "is this recoverable, and is the save worth it?" Your job is to know the difference, argue the commercial case credibly, and know when Compliance is right.

2. Own the early-warning queue.

You work a weekly save list built from real signals off our dashboards: TPV drops, stranded or abandoned checkout intents, post-repricing attrition, negative-balance and hold events, and the outputs of our churn and unhappy-customer monitoring. You get to at-risk accounts before they become departures, and you drive the time-to-lift on holds down.

3. Win-back and activation.

4. Expansion of the existing base.

How your success is measured

- Net revenue (gross-profit) retention of the existing book — the headline number.

- Save rate on flagged / at-risk accounts.

- Time-to-lift on holds and settlement freezes.

- Reactivation revenue from win-back and activation.

- Attach / upsell revenue from terminal, omni, BillPay and VA.

Explicitly not new-logo acquisition. This role is judged on the book you keep and grow, not the logos you add.

Your first months

- First 30 days — learn the book and the dashboards, sit in on live hold/release decisions with Compliance, and agree the decision framework and SLA for commercial account actions.
— the weekly save-list cadence is running and you're personally working at-risk and win-back accounts, with a baseline for save rate and time-to-lift.

- By 3 months — measurable improvement in net revenue retention on the book, a repeatable win-back motion against the lapsed and never-transacted cohorts, and a clear view of where a hire or two would compound your leverage.

Who you are

- 8–12 years in payments, on the merchant-facing side. You've run an SMB merchant portfolio or an account-management function at a PSP or acquirer — Stripe, Adyen, 2C2P, Airwallex, Nium, or a local acquirer's merchant-services arm — or merchant acquiring at a bank.

- Risk-fluent — this is the non-negotiable. You genuinely understand chargebacks, negative balances, settlement and payout holds, reserves, and RFI/KYC mechanics — well enough to argue a case with a risk and compliance team credibly, and to recognise when they're right. This is the single filter that matters most: a strong sales or customer-success operator without payments-risk depth loses every internal argument, and the role fails. If you can't hold your own in a risk conversation, this isn't the seat.

- A player-coach who's data-native. There is no team under you at the start — you work the queues yourself, off our dashboards and data. You're comfortable with numbers, BI and SQL-level thinking, and you reach for AI tooling to work at a scale one person otherwise couldn't. You'll have more of that leverage here than at any comparable company.

- Commercially sharp and merchant-obsessed. You can look at an account and see both the risk exposure and the lifetime value, and make the call.

Nice to have

- Direct experience sitting between commercial and risk/compliance — owning hold/release, reserve, or reinstatement decisions.

- A track record you can point to: specific save rates, retained revenue, reactivation or upsell numbers.

- Exposure to SMB-heavy portfolios and high-velocity merchant bases in Southeast Asia.

- Fluency with modern data and AI tooling for portfolio work.

This isn't for you if

- You're a new-logo, enterprise hunter — your track record is acquisition, not retention.

- You're a SaaS customer-success manager without payments-risk depth — great with relationships, but you've never argued a chargeback, a hold, or a negative balance.

- You treat the compliance team as the enemy. This role partners with Compliance and arbitrates commercial cases within their guardrails; it does not fight them.

Why HitPay

You'll own a P&L-relevant mandate with real autonomy, direct access to the CEO, and the clearest ROI in the company — saving two or three high-value accounts a year covers your seat entirely, before a dollar of win-back or upsell. You'll operate with more AI leverage than you'd get anywhere comparable, and you'll build the function — and eventually the team — from the ground up.