Cards Platform Consolidation and Market-Launch Director

The mandate

A European consumer lender has lost its cards technology director six weeks after a consolidation release produced posting breaks, duplicate servicing work and an aborted co-brand launch. Country teams have since protected customers with manual controls and local code changes, weakening the very single-codebase strategy intended to reduce release risk. The interim leader takes an executive seat now because the lender cannot leave platform recovery, collections improvement and two contracted market launches divided among product, engineering and its processor while a permanent search unfolds.

The appointment starts no later than 5 October 2026 and runs for ten months, five days a week. The first fortnight is an in-person Warsaw assumption of command; thereafter the pattern combines two Warsaw anchor weeks monthly with planned country and processor visits. A permanent technology-delivery appointment will be recruited in parallel and is expected to overlap for the final six weeks. The term is fixed with no extension: launch dates, successor induction and the operating calendar must be designed to that boundary rather than relying on more interim time.

Handover will be complete only when the production estate is operating on the approved common release, aged posting and reconciliation breaks are below the risk-committee threshold, the collections payment journey has passed loss and conduct controls, and both committed market launches have survived thirty days of live operation. The permanent successor must inherit named service owners, a funded eighteen-month roadmap, an evidence-backed release calendar, reconciled supplier obligations and a leadership team able to run it without the interim's personal escalation network.

The director may sequence releases, stop unsafe deployments, redeploy programme capacity within the approved PLN envelope, enforce one defect and dependency view, and approve supplier work orders below PLN3 million. The CIO must approve any processor replacement, capital increase, market withdrawal, permanent senior hire or work order above that threshold; product pricing and credit policy remain with the Chief Consumer Officer and Chief Risk Officer. The interim may remove contractors for performance or control reasons but may not permanently restructure employment or renegotiate collective arrangements.

This mandate does not include redesigning the lender's enterprise data platform, replacing the authorisation processor, changing credit appetite or repairing unrelated mortgage systems. It also excludes a broad agile reorganisation and a cosmetic relabelling of local teams as a global product model. The work is narrower and harder: restore release integrity, finish rationalisation without erasing legitimate market rules, launch what has been contracted, and leave an operating system the successor can govern.

Why this seat is open

The incumbent resigned after the board halted a release whose reported readiness did not match production reconciliation and customer-service evidence. Two country launches carry contractual dates, while local remediation is steadily rebuilding platform divergence. The CIO began a permanent search immediately but needs one accountable leader in the seat before the next release window, with a planned six-week handover inside the fixed ten-month term.

What you will own

• Establish one production truth for authorisation, posting, clearing, settlement, statements, rewards and collections defects, including financial exposure and customer populations rather than ticket volume alone.
• Decide the sequence for retiring local card code, preserving statutory market differences and returning emergency fixes to the common release without compromising current account servicing.
• Rebuild release gates around reconciled test evidence, processor certification, operational rehearsal, rollback viability and named acceptance by product, finance, risk and country operations.
• Direct the two co-brand launches through proposition freeze, scheme and processor dependencies, account origination, servicing, rewards, statements, collections, complaints and thirty-day stabilisation.
• Redesign the digital collections payment journey to reduce failed arrangements and delinquency loss while preserving affordability assessment, customer consent, vulnerability treatment and auditability.
• Reset internal and supplier capacity against the critical path, approve permitted work orders and make shortfalls visible before teams conceal them through deferred controls or heroic overtime.
• Prepare the permanent successor's handover pack, including service ownership, release obligations, country exceptions, unresolved risk acceptances, supplier positions and an eighteen-month investment roadmap.

Candidate qualifications

• Led a cards technology or consumer-lending platform portfolio through production recovery, consolidation or material multi-market change at director or executive level.
• Delivered a credit-card, co-brand, private-label or adjacent lending product on a compressed timetable with accountability across origination, processing, servicing, rewards and collections.
• Consolidated market variants to a common codebase or platform while preserving defensible regulatory, scheme and customer-treatment differences.
• Directed distributed internal and partner teams exceeding 150 people and controlled a technology or change portfolio of at least USD25 million equivalent.
• Managed card-processor, scheme, reconciliation and financial-posting dependencies through a release in which stopping or rolling back carried commercial consequences.
• Can evidence a digital payment or collections intervention that improved customer completion, delinquency outcomes or operating loss without weakening conduct controls.

Non-negotiables

• Available to start by 5 October 2026, work five days weekly and spend the first two weeks plus two anchor weeks monthly in Warsaw.
• Has personally held stop-release authority for a customer-facing cards platform and will use it when reconciliation or operational evidence is inadequate.
• Accepts the ten-month fixed term, six-week successor overlap and no-extension boundary without making permanent employment a condition.
• Can complete Polish and relevant cross-border regulatory, conflicts and background diligence before accessing production and customer information.

1. 49 words maximum. State your earliest start date and describe the card-platform release you stopped, narrowed or recovered because production-readiness evidence was unreliable.
2. 49 words maximum. Describe one rapid card or co-brand launch you led: markets, elapsed time, platform scope, team scale and the first thirty-day outcome.
3. 49 words maximum. How did you remove local code from a multi-country cards estate without losing mandatory market behaviour or disrupting collections and servicing?