Role       : Business Analyst
Location : Sharjah
Role Purpose:
The Business Analyst role is crucial in bridging the gap between business strategy, regulatory compliance, and technical implementation for the merchant facing payment solutions, defining and analyzing system challenges, devising and testing standards and solutions. This includes projects, BAU solutions, and improvements. Prior to implementation, the position will examine the solution built on the platform to ensure that it fits the business requirements, solution scope, and payment scheme processing requirements.
    
Key Accountabilities of the role      
Lead the discovery, analysis, and detailed documentation of business requirements (functional and non-functional) for new or enhanced card acquiring products and services. 

• Translate high-level business objectives into clear, concise artifacts, including use case, user journey, business process model, sequence diagrams, end to end transactions flow and detailed functional specifications.
• Manage and prioritize the product backlog in collaboration with product owners, ensuring alignment with strategic goals and technical feasibility. 
• Act as a subject matter expert for card acquiring payment system expertise, including understanding global and domestic card scheme rules, interchange fees, card branding mandates, settlement processes, scheme clearing processes, scheme compliances.
• Monitor changes in payment regulations and card scheme rules, assessing the impact on current systems and driving necessary compliance changes. 
• Analyze and optimize merchant risk and fraud detection flows in partnership with Risk and Compliance Team.
• Conduct complex data analysis, financial modeling, and cost assessments to support business cases for new acquiring features or platform enhancements.
• Define the solution design, ensuring technical solutions accurately reflect business requirements and adhere to performance, security and scalability standards.
• Identify opportunities for process automation and efficiency improvements within the acquiring operational workflow. 
• Facilitate workshops, meetings and cross-functional working groups involving business stakeholders, product managers and technology leadership.
• Manage stakeholder expectations and resolve conflicts by balancing competing needs and achieving consensus on scope and priority.
• Define acceptance criteria and success metrics for all requirements.
• Lead and coordinate user acceptance testing and system integration testing activities, ensuring the delivered solution meets the defined business requirements and quality standards.
• Support post-implementation validation and monitoring to ensure business value realization and stable operation.

Specialist Skills / Technical Knowledge Required for this role:

• Experience (4 – 5 Years) with specific card schemes compliance projects.
• Experience (4 – 5 Years) with payment acquiring systems (Authorization and Back-office)
• Extensive experience (4 - 5 Years) in the Financial Services Industry (preferably acquiring) as a business analyst/technical role.
• Experience (1 – 2 Years) with API specifications and integration analysis.
• Relevant experience of working with Merchant Acquirers or Cards Divisions of large banks or Vendors. (Mandatory) 
• Proactive, collaborative attitude and gravitas to work on a client site.
• Good communication and presentations skills.
• Preferably understand Islamic Banking & Shariah workflows.