The opportunity
A Nordic bank is roughly a year into a multi-stream payment transformation programme. We're recruiting a Senior Project Manager to take ownership of one of its largest and most complex workstreams: the migration of account-to-account (A2A) batch payments from legacy infrastructure to ISO 20022.
This is not programme oversight — it's hands-on, end-to-end ownership of a single high-stakes project that has to land cleanly inside a wider transformation. The client's bar is high, and they want someone who has demonstrably done this kind of payments delivery before, not a generalist learning the domain on the job.
The project is heavily dependency-driven: 50+ dependencies need to be delivered, completed and tested across the IT landscape before it can go live. The core challenge is less about writing a plan and more about understanding how the business actually works, translating business requirements into delivered results, and holding 50+ moving parts together through to a tested, proven outcome.
The split we're hiring against is deliberate: heavyweight IT delivery leadership is well covered. The piece that's missing — and the reason this hire matters — is genuine, hands-on payments domain knowledge layered on top of that delivery rigour.
What you'll own
- End-to-end delivery of the A2A batch payments migration to ISO 20022
- Mapping and managing 50+ cross-system dependencies through delivery, completion and test
- Translating business requirements into technical delivery across the IT landscape
- Planning, execution, dependency management and risk management for the full project lifecycle
- Direct leadership of a 10–15 person team within a wider project group of c. 32
- Working into Janne and the broader programme leadership to keep the project aligned with the transformation
Essential experience
- Has personally run a payments project at scale — tens of millions in value. This is non-negotiable; the client wants someone who has been the PM on comparable delivery, not adjacent to it.
- Strong track record leading complex IT delivery in a banking or financial-services environment
- Demonstrable strength in the four core PM disciplines: planning, execution, dependency management, risk management
- Comfortable owning and translating business requirements into delivered technical outcomes
- Experience leading mid-sized delivery teams (10–15+)
Payment schemes — what we're looking for
The bank's target schemes are NPC-based (Nordic Payments Council). These are built on the SEPA rulebooks but are newer versions with relatively small differences — so the bar here is practical, not exotic:
- Sufficient: has run a project or programme on SEPA, SEPA Classic, or SEPA Instant
- Strong plus: prior NPC scheme experience and/or Nordics market exposure
- ISO 20022 migration experience is highly relevant given the nature of the project