[Hiring] Regional Partner Relations Lead @dLocal

Role Description

We are hiring a Regional Partner Relations Lead – Asia to drive strategic relationships with payment partners, financial institutions, and regulators across our priority markets: India, Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Japan (including Greater China corridor dynamics).

Sitting at the intersection of Growth Ops & Partnerships and APAC Operations, you will own the strategic relationships. This includes leading joint business plans, pricing negotiations, and high-level escalations.

Your ultimate goal is to leverage tools, automation, and strong partnerships to drive sustainable TPV, margin growth, and resilience across the region.

This role operates in close coordination with Country Managers who own day-to-day operational and commercial execution in-market.

What will you be doing?

• Own and nurture strategic relationships with key regional and global partners (e.g., multi-market processors, scheme partners, corridor providers, wallets) and relevant regulators/central banks across our priority Asian markets.
• Build senior, multi-level relationships (C‑level, product, operations, risk, regulatory) to ensure we are a trusted, strategic counterpart and invited early into discussions on new products and regulatory changes.
• Lead joint business planning with priority partners: define and run plans covering TPV growth, product roadmap, performance targets, economics and joint marketing or go-to-market initiatives.
• Identify and prioritize new workstreams with partners (new countries, payment methods such as APMs, wallets or RTP, new features, and commercial models) that strengthen our product and economic performance in Asia.
• Monitor partner performance and economics using data and dashboards (approval rates, latency, uptime, SLAs, incident volume, TPV/margin by corridor and merchant cluster) and drive improvement plans.
• Improve unit economics and NTR by negotiating pricing, tiers, FX spreads and incentives in coordination with Finance and Global Partners & Enablement.
• Strengthen resilience and redundancy by ensuring fallback providers and alternative routes for critical flows in Asia, aligned with global resilience targets.
• Track regulatory and scheme developments affecting the region, assess impact, and coordinate clear action plans with internal teams (including support for licenses, audits and compliance work).
• Act as the internal escalation point and subject matter expert for cross-market partner and regulator topics in Asia, enabling Commercial, Core Ops, and Product teams to execute quickly and consistently.
• Standardize and scale how we work with partners by contributing to playbooks, templates and onboarding materials – including identifying opportunities to automate repetitive workflows, reporting, and incident follow-up.

Qualifications

• 8–12+ years of experience in payments, fintech, banking or card schemes, with a focus on partnerships, business development or strategic account management.
• Multi-Market Experience: Proven track record of managing partner relationships across 3+ Asian markets simultaneously.
• Experience on the processor, acquirer, or PSP side of the value chain — particularly in payin / payout routing, approval rate optimization, or multi-provider resilience.
• Proven track record owning senior relationships with major banks, wallets, processors or PSPs, card schemes (e.g., Visa, Mastercard), or regulators, central banks or public authorities in financial services.
• Hands-on experience leading cross-functional initiatives (commercial, product, operations, compliance) such as launching new payment methods, corridors or regulatory-driven changes.
• Structured, analytical mindset: confident working with TPV, conversion, cost and margin data to define priorities, size opportunities and track impact.
• Automation and process mindset: able to spot opportunities to streamline partner management.
• Excellent communicator in English (Advanced, mandatory) – both written and verbal.
• Language Skills: Mandarin Chinese proficiency (spoken and written) is strongly preferred.
• High ownership and bias to action: comfortable with ambiguity and incomplete information.
• Ability to navigate complex organizations, aligning diverse stakeholders around clear, measurable outcomes.

Nice to have

• Exposure to BNPL, wallets, RTP and alternative payment methods strategies in emerging markets.
• Prior experience interacting with Asian regulators, central banks or industry associations.