Open-Banking Ecosystem Contract Director

The mandate

The bank’s open ecosystem has accumulated bespoke uptime promises, notice periods, liability positions, test access and support paths for more than sixty partners. Product teams cannot retire old API versions because a handful of contracts preserve indefinite access, while procurement savings are offset by manual operations and unpriced change. The defined problem is to establish a governable partnership architecture without unlawfully narrowing regulated access or destabilising live customer journeys.

The deliverables are a partner segmentation model, modular API contract schedule, service-and-evidence catalogue, change and deprecation mechanism, exception-governance design and migration negotiation pack. The design must separate mandatory access from premium bilateral services, align technical obligations with observable measures, assign costs to non-standard commitments and preserve consistent treatment where competition or open-banking rules constrain commercial discretion.

Three milestones structure four months: by week four, approve the obligation and exception baseline across a representative contract set; by week ten, complete the target service, commercial and legal modules with tested partner scenarios; and by week seventeen, deliver migration waves, negotiation positions, governance thresholds and an executive decision paper. Payment is billed against those three milestones after documented acceptance.

The group digital partnerships director and procurement officer will accept the package when legal, platform operations and partner managers can apply it to five contrasting partners and reach the same tier, obligations, evidence and escalation outcome. Acceptance also requires a costed path for inherited exceptions, a defensible regulatory analysis supplied by client counsel, executable deprecation notices and no dependency on the consultant to interpret ordinary future negotiations.

The client provides executed agreements, partner economics, API traffic, incident histories, support demand, change records, regulatory counsel, service measures and access to selected counterparties. The consultant does not give legal advice, renegotiate contracts, set regulated-access policy, operate APIs, select partners or approve pricing; management owns external negotiations and any deviation from the recommended modular terms.

Why this is external work

Every internal owner sees a rational fragment: sales protects relationships, legal protects precedent, platform teams protect reliability and procurement protects headline price. No function is accountable for the combined cost and rigidity of a bespoke promise across its lifetime. External leadership can expose that whole-system economics, distinguish mandatory openness from optional service and design a migration position unburdened by authorship of the original exceptions.

What you will own

• Inventory contractual, technical and operational obligations across partner types, API families, jurisdictions and inherited bilateral exceptions.
• Quantify the lifecycle cost of bespoke support, extended versions, unusual evidence, accelerated change and non-standard incident commitments.
• Segment partners using regulatory status, customer criticality, consumption pattern, operational complexity and reciprocal ecosystem contribution.
• Design modular schedules for service levels, support, security evidence, testing, change notice, deprecation, liability and data use.
• Create exception thresholds, approval routes, expiry mechanisms and economic visibility that prevent permanent one-off commitments.
• Test target terms against fintech, enterprise, aggregator, public-interest and low-volume partner scenarios with client counsel.
• Deliver migration waves, negotiation playbooks, fallback positions and a governance dashboard for future partnership decisions.

Candidate qualifications

• Has redesigned API or digital-platform partnership contracts inside a regulated bank, payment network or comparable access regime.
• Understands how uptime, latency, support, test environments, versioning and deprecation clauses translate into engineering cost and risk.
• Can distinguish statutory or scheme access duties from premium services that may carry negotiated commercial terms.
• Has migrated a large installed partner base away from bilateral exceptions without creating uncontrolled customer or regulatory disruption.
• Works credibly across product, procurement, legal counsel, engineering operations and counterparties with materially different bargaining power.
• Produces modular commercial artefacts that operating teams can apply consistently after the engagement rather than bespoke legal commentary.

Non-negotiables

• Can lead fortnightly London workshops and attend the scheduled Berlin partner council despite the otherwise remote arrangement.
• Will disclose work for banks, fintechs, aggregators, API vendors, procurement advisers and current or prospective counterparties.
• Brings executed regulated-API contract architecture; generic technology sourcing or alliance management is not sufficient.
• Accepts that client counsel owns legal conclusions and bank officers retain all external negotiation and approval authority.

1. 49 words maximum. Which API contract promise created the largest hidden operating cost in your prior work?
2. 49 words maximum. How would you separate mandatory open access from a legitimately chargeable premium service?
3. 49 words maximum. What test would show that partner managers can apply the new exception rules consistently?