Senior Partner Operations Manager (German Speaking)

Company Description

Wise Platform allows banks, fintechs, and enterprises to embed Wise's international payments infrastructure directly into their own products. Our technology powers partners globally - including some of the largest banks and fintechs in EMEA - enabling them to offer fast, transparent, and low-cost cross-border payments and global accounts to their customers.

More about Wise Platform and what we offer.

Job Description

About the role:

EMEA is Wise Platform's largest and most mature market. This role owns the operational relationship and volume retention for a portfolio of Tier 1 partners representing 10M+ GBP in annual revenue across the UK and Germany - some of the most strategically important and technically complex partnerships in Wise Platform globally. Knowledge of payments / cross-border payments industry and German language skills are a essential for this role.

You are a strategic architect and trusted operations and scalability advisor to partner leadership, responsible for identifying and closing operational gaps internally that unlock organic revenue before they become blockers proactively.

This is not a reactive role.

You'll manage operational relationship of partnerships with complex product integrations (Cards, MCA, Correspondent send via API and Swift, Correspondent receive), navigate high-level stakeholder alignment, and influence Wise's own Product and Servicing roadmaps to ensure the platform evolves to meet the needs of our most demanding partners.

You'll operate with significant autonomy, represent the company with the senior partner’s stakeholders and build the frameworks and playbooks that scale the "Wise way of working" - not just for your own accounts, but across the CSM organisation.

Commercial & Relationship Ownership

Own the end-to-end operational relationship for Tier 1 EMEA partners - acting as a trusted advisor to partner-side operational and executive stakeholders, including senior leadership and product teams

Lead QBRs that frame operational performance in the context of commercial goals - shaping the partner's growth narrative and roadmap alignment

Independently drive operational success strategy and plans for owned accounts, partnering closely with the Account Manager to ensure operational roadmap aligns with commercial goals.

Systemic Problem Solving & Roadmap Influence

Proactively identify and close operational gaps that unlock revenue - e.g. new currency expansion, Cards adoption, or reducing defect/RFI/contact rates that limit partner scalability and growth;

Build data-backed business cases to secure buy-in from Product, Servicing, Compliance, and Engineering - resolving structural/systemic gaps in the company that affect not just your accounts but the wider Wise Platform partner base;

Represent Wise Platform in cross-functional initiatives, influencing the roadmap before problems surface for partners;

Incident Command & Crisis Management

Ability to act as incident commander for cross-regional, high-severity incidents - coordinating tech, commercial, and operational stakeholders, drafting partner communications, and making the call on when/how to communicate with partners

Own post-incident follow-through: postmortem actions, remediation reviews, and translating incident learnings into reusable frameworks (runbooks, comms criteria, escalation playbooks)

Scaling the Function

Build frameworks and playbooks - for new products (e.g. metrics reporting or servicing flows on the new product), new markets, or cross-team processes - that scale beyond your own portfolio

Mentor and support other Partner Operations team members, helping them navigate operational blockers and develop their own account strategies

Contribute to the Partner Operations organisation's own scaling agenda - flagging and addressing systemic capacity issues (e.g. disproportionate incident load) to leadership with data to back it up

Data-Driven Operational Excellence

Own the core Service Level and Operational Scalability metrics for your portfolio: Payment Success Rate, Contact Rate, RFI Rate, Defect Rate, and Partner Health Score

Use advanced data analysis to identify non-obvious operational blockers and pitch API/process improvements with clear ROI framing for both partner and Wise

About you:

• Experience in project management, business operations and account management for Tier 1 enterprise clients in payments, fintech, or financial services

• Professional-level German proficiency (spoken and written) - required, given the portfolio will include few German-speaking partners;

• Proven experience working with Tier 1 relationships with $5M+ ARR clients, including executive-level stakeholder management

• Strong technical fluency - comfortable discussing APIs, webhooks, and payment rails in detail with partner engineering teams

• Experience leading incident/crisis response with external clients, including comms strategy and de-escalation

• Advanced data analysis skills - SQL/Looker/Lightdash or equivalent - used to build business cases;

• Demonstrated negotiation and strong presentation skills; comfortable pitching roadmap changes to senior partner stakeholders.

Bonus points:

• Experience with regulatory frameworks affecting cross-border payments (AML, KYC, sanctions screening, PEP/COAF-type reporting)

• Prior ownership of Tier 1 bank or major fintech relationships in EMEA specifically

• Additional language skills (French, Portuguese) relevant to other Tier 1 EMEA accounts

• Experience working in business operations.

Additional Information

For everyone, everywhere. We're people building money without borders - without judgement or prejudice, too. We believe teams are strongest when they are diverse, equitable and inclusive.

We're proud to have a truly international team, and we celebrate our differences.

Inclusive teams help us live our values and make sure every Wiser feels respected, empowered to contribute towards our mission and able to progress in their careers.

If you want to find out more about what it's like to work at Wise visit Wise.Jobs.

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