Financial Partnerships Lead - Market Expansion, Singapore/Hong Kong/Malaysia

Xendit · Hong Kong, Singapore

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About the Job

Xendit is going from a Southeast Asian payments provider to a global one. Nothing in that sentence happens without rails. Every market we want to sell in has to exist before it can be sold in — an entity, a licence or a licensed partner, bank accounts, and live rails — and every market we already sell in only earns what its partner economics allow.

This role owns both halves, at roughly equal weight.

Market expansion. You will help decide which markets we enter, build the case that gets them funded, choose whether we build, buy, or partner for the licence, and then run the entry end to end until the market is licensed, funded, connected, and handed over to a country commercial lead. You will do it as a repeatable playbook rather than a one-off project, so the second market is faster than the first and the fifth is faster than the second.

Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong. You will own Xendit’s financial partner portfolio in those three markets — the banks, wallets, card schemes, FX providers and domestic rails we run on. You own the relationships, the commercials, the performance, and the cost of every rail in your markets.

Responsibilities

Market expansion

• Market intelligence. Screen and rank candidate markets on market size, regulatory openness, payment rails, competitive density, and merchant demand. Maintain a live pipeline and a decision-ready entry book per market.
• Business case and investment decision. Build the cost-to-launch and cost-to-operate model, the revenue and margin projection, and the breakeven view. Take the go/no-go paper to leadership and defend it.
• Licensing strategy. Recommend build, buy, or partner per market. Select the licence type, shape the regulator engagement approach, and hold a coherent licensing roadmap across markets rather than a footprint we did not design.
• Foundational set-up. Drive entity incorporation, the licence application end to end, bank account opening, and scheme and rail access — executing with Corporate Secretarial, Legal, Compliance, and Treasury.
• Programme management. One timeline, one budget, one risk register per market. Convene the functions, hold them to dates, and escalate early and specifically when a gate is at risk.
• The playbook. Turn each entry into reusable artefacts — stage gates, application pack templates, a common business case model, a bank account approach, a handover checklist — and own the country-specific deviations.
• Handover. Support the hire of the country commercial lead, operationalise the licence with Compliance, and hand over against a defined readiness bar. Until every item on that bar is true, the market is still yours.

Financial partnerships in Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong

• Partner portfolio strategy. Decide which partners we run which rails and corridors on, where we need redundancy, and what the partner roadmap is for each of the three markets.
• Commercials. Negotiate pricing, rebates, revenue share, and FX spreads. Use volume across markets as leverage rather than negotiating each market from scratch. Own the contract lifecycle with Legal.
• Cost of rails. Own COGS in your markets. Find the margin, model it, and work with Product and Treasury to move routing and volume to where the economics are better.
• Partner performance. Set and enforce SLAs, run QBRs, chase root causes when a rail underperforms, and manage escalations with the partner rather than around them.
• Regulatory posture with partners. Keep partner flows appropriate to our licences in each market, make sure agreements carry the right AML and KYC responsibilities, and give Compliance and the country teams a clear view of each partner’s regulatory role.
• Being the accountable owner. Every partnership has one accountable owner. For these markets, it is you. Other teams can talk to partners directly for execution and compliance; nothing material happens without you.
• Unblocking commercial deals. Support sales cycles that turn on a partner capability we do not yet have, and bring the market and merchant insight back into the global partner strategy.

The Questions You Will Answer

• Which markets should Xendit enter next, in what order, and which ones should we decline?
• What will it actually cost and how long will it actually take to be able to process a first transaction there?
• Do we build our own licence, acquire one, or launch on a partner’s — and what does that trade in cost, speed, control, and margin?
• What has to be true before we commit commercially or hire in a market?
• Where is the margin in Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong, and what has to change to get it?
• Which rails in these markets are a single point of failure, and what is the backup?
• What did the last entry teach us that makes the next one cheaper and faster?
• Is this market genuinely ready to run itself, or are we handing over a problem?

Minimum Qualifications

• 3+ years of experience running a complex cross-functional programme to a committed date — not only designing the plan, but landing it. Backgrounds that travel well here include top-tier management consulting, corporate development or strategy at a high-growth technology or financial services company, and programme leadership at a payments, banking, or fintech business.
• Experience running a complex cross-functional programme to a committed date — not only designing the plan, but landing it. Backgrounds that travel well here include top-tier management consulting, corporate development or strategy at a high-growth technology or financial services company, and partnership or programme leadership at a payments, banking, or fintech business.
• A track record of negotiating and running commercial relationships with banks, card schemes, wallets, or payment providers. You have held a number and moved it.
• Working knowledge of payment regulation, banking, and payment infrastructure. You do not need to be a lawyer. You do need to hold a credible conversation with a regulator, a global bank, and our own Compliance team on the same day.
• Strong commercial and financial judgment: you can build the model, stress the assumptions, and say plainly when a market does not clear the bar.
• Exceptional written communication. Much of the output of this role is a paper that a CEO, a board, or a regulator reads without you in the room.
• A genuine global operator who translates across cultures and domains. Relationship building and regulator engagement in developed markets do not work the way they do in Southeast Asia, and this role has to work in both. Familiarity with the Malaysian, Singaporean, or Hong Kong payments landscape is a clear advantage.
• A strong team player. On the expansion half this role has no line authority over the functions it depends on and has to earn its way through them.
• Comfort with ambiguity and with owning an outcome that is largely dependent on other people’s work.
• A bachelor’s degree in an analytically rigorous discipline.

You Will Thrive Here If You

• Are more interested in the market going live than in the plan being elegant.
• Sequence properly: you establish whether we can be licensed, at what cost and by when, before anyone commits.
• Bring functions in at the start as inputs rather than at the end as approvers, and hold them to dates without turning it into a fight.
• Are willing to recommend a no-go on a market leadership is excited about, with the analysis to support it.
• Build things that outlast you: templates, models, and playbooks the next person inherits.
• Are energised by a fast pace, high accountability, and direct feedback.

Working Model

• Based in Singapore or Hong Kong.
• We expect team members in the office four days per week to support close collaboration and fast decisions.
• Travel of approximately 20–30%, to target markets, regulators, banks, and partners, weighted to the entries in flight.

Why This Role?

• Most people who work on market entry do one market, once, inside a function. Here you own the whole sequence — the screen, the case, the licence, the accounts, the rails, the handover — and then you own it again in the next market, with the advantage of having built the playbook. It is one of the few roles where the scope of what you own is genuinely limited only by how fast you can make the machine work.
• If you want a defined lane inside an established process, this is not the role. If you want to build the capability that decides where a payments company can operate, we would like to hear from you.

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