Lead PayOps

Are you looking to have an impact on the daily life of millions of entrepreneurs in France (and tomorrow in Europe)?

Are you looking for a work environment that values trust, proactivity, and autonomy?

Then Pennylane is the right place for you !

Our vision

We aim to become the most beloved financial Operating System of French SMEs and Accounting Firms (and soon, European ones).

We help entrepreneurs rid themselves of time-consuming tasks related to accounting and finance while providing them with access to key financial information to assist in making the best decisions for their business.

About us

Pennylane is one of the fastest growing Fintechs in France (and soon to be in Europe!)

In 5 years of existence, we’ve managed to :

💻 Make ourselves known as a groundbreaking accounting and financial software for small businesses and their accountants

💰 Raise a total of €400 millions, including from Sequoia, the famous fund from the Silicon Valley who invested early in companies like Google, Facebook, Airbnb, Stripe, Paypal and much more...

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Grow from 7 cofounders to 1000 happy Pennylaners : we’re now recognized as one of the greatest places to work in France (and also remotely), with a 4.6/5 rating on Glassdoor .

🌍 Build an international environment with more than 25 nationalities, with a strong remote-friendly culture, where 30% of the employees are already working from all parts of Europe

🤝 Earn the trust of thousands of customers and accounting firms and obtain outstanding ratings

🚀 Already more than 1 300,000 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and over 6000 accounting firms use Pennylane in France!

Role context

Pennylane operates today tens of thousands of business accounts through a BaaS model. As Financial Services becomes a larger part of Pennylane’s strategy, we are building Pennylane Financial Services and applying for Établissement de paiement and Société de financement licences.

Our ambition is to start onboarding new customers under our own licensed entity by early 2027, before progressively migrating existing customers. To make this possible, we are building the operational foundations of a regulated financial entity across onboarding, transaction monitoring, fraud, risk and payment operations.

As Lead Payment Operations , you will be one of the first operational leaders joining this greenfield setup. Reporting to the General Manager / Head of Operations of Pennylane Financial Services, you will own the operational execution of payment operations across SEPA transfers and direct debits, cards, international transfers, cheques, and cash / collateral management.

Your mission will be to build, structure and scale the payment operations setup needed to support growing volumes, ensure reliable execution, manage incidents, and protect customer experience while embedding the controls expected from a strong first line of defense.

This is a high-autonomy role with direct exposure to a strategic regulatory project, close collaboration with Product, Tech, Compliance, Risk and external payment partners, and the opportunity to shape the payment operating model of a fast-growing fintech serving hundreds of thousands of French SMEs.

Responsibilities

Payment operations & execution

Own the end-to-end operational execution of payment operations across:

SEPA transfers and direct debits,

cards,

international transfers,

cheques,

cash and collateral management.

Ensure day-to-day reliability of payment operations, including exception handling, operational follow-up, issue resolution, external requests.

Act as the operational point of escalation for payment incidents: triage, coordination, customer impact assessment, mitigation, root cause analysis and durable corrective actions.

Maintain strong auditability of operational decisions, reconciliations, exceptions and incidents.

Operating model, controls & scalability

Build and continuously improve the payment operations operating model:

processes,

SLAs,

runbooks,

documentation,

knowledge base,

onboarding and training materials.

Define clear ownership, escalation paths and rituals for payment operations.

Design and embed first-line controls aligned with operational risk, regulatory expectations and customer protection.

Implement reconciliation, exception-management and incident-management practices proportionate to the risks of each payment rail.

Prepare the function to scale from an initial team of 3 people to around 10 people while maintaining quality, resilience and operational discipline.

Performance management & continuous improvement

Define, monitor and report on payment operations KPIs, including:

volumes,

success rates,

exception and error rates,

incident frequency and MTTR,

backlog,

SLA adherence,

customer-impact metrics.

Use operational data to identify bottlenecks, recurring issues and high-leverage improvement opportunities.

Drive continuous improvement cycles to reduce manual work, shorten resolution times and improve reliability.

Build the reporting cadence needed to keep internal stakeholders aligned on performance, risks and priorities.

Tooling, automation & Product collaboration

Partner closely with Product and Tech teams to shape payment back-office tooling and operational workflows.

Translate operational pain points into clear product requirements, acceptance criteria and post-launch monitoring needs.

Contribute to operational testing before go-live, beyond technical QA: runbooks, edge cases, incident scenarios, reconciliation and handover processes.

Identify and prioritize automation opportunities that improve efficiency, quality and customer experience.

Balance automation and manual controls pragmatically during the first scaling phase.

Incident management & customer protection

Build a structured incident-management framework for payment operations:

severity levels,

ownership,

communication rhythm,

escalation paths,

root cause analysis,

prevention actions.

Coordinate with Customer Support, Product, Tech, Compliance, Risk and external partners during operational incidents.

Ensure customer-facing issues such as blocked payments, missing transactions, failed transfers or delayed resolutions are handled with urgency and clarity.

Use post-mortems and operational learnings to prevent recurrence and improve customer transparency.

External stakeholder management

Build and maintain strong operational relationships with payment processing providers, partner banks and other external stakeholders.

Define escalation routines and performance expectations with external partners.

Keep providers accountable using facts, metrics and structured follow-up.

Ensure third-party dependencies are well understood, monitored and integrated into Pennylane Financial Services’ operating model.

Team build-up & leadership

Recruit, onboard, train and manage the payment operations team.

Operate as a player/coach: remain hands-on on critical topics while progressively building team capacity and autonomy.

Define roles, responsibilities, workload distribution and coverage model.

Build a team culture based on ownership, rigor, customer protection, operational excellence and continuous learning.

Develop the team’s skills across payment operations, incident management, controls and stakeholder management.

First 6–12 months priorities

Map current and target payment operations processes across payment rails and identify operational gaps.

Define the target operating model, including rituals, SLAs, controls, escalation paths and reporting.

Build the first version of payment operations runbooks, incident procedures and reconciliation framework.

Set up operational KPIs and reporting routines.

Contribute to the design, testing and launch readiness of payment back-office tooling.

Recruit and onboard the first team