Payment Operations Associate
“Be at the Heart of Every Transaction”
At Castle Trust Bank, we pride ourselves in being a fintech challenger bank, providing specialist property mortgages, retail finance lending and savings accounts to a variety of customers.
Delivering excellent customer outcomes starts with getting the fundamentals right. Our Payment Operations team plays a vital role in ensuring customer payments, reconciliations and operational processes are completed accurately, efficiently and securely every day.
This role is based in Basingstoke and will require attendance in the office five days per week during the probation period to support onboarding and the development of role competency. Upon successful completion of probation and achievement of full competency, the role will transition to a hybrid working pattern of three days in the office and two days working from home.
The role and what you’ll lead and deliver:
We're looking for a Payment Operations Associate to join our growing team. This is an excellent opportunity for someone with experience in payments, reconciliations or financial operations who enjoys working with data, solving problems and maintaining high standards of accuracy.
You'll work across our Savings, Property, Omni and Treasury business lines, helping to ensure payments are processed correctly, controls are maintained and customers receive a seamless experience.
Payments Processing
- Process inbound and outbound payments accurately and within agreed service levels.
- Complete daily payment activities across multiple business areas.
- Ensure all payment instructions meet internal procedures and regulatory requirements.
- Investigate and resolve payment exceptions, returned payments and processing errors.
Reconciliations & Controls
- Perform daily and monthly reconciliations across bank accounts and internal systems.
- Investigate and resolve reconciliation discrepancies.
- Operate key controls, maintain accurate audit trails and escalate issues where required.
- Support effective risk management through adherence to operational procedures and controls.
Stakeholder Support & Continuous Improvement
- Respond to customer and internal operational queries within agreed service levels.
- Support change initiatives, testing activities and system enhancements.
- Identify opportunities to improve processes, controls and operational efficiency.
- Maintain accurate procedures and contribute to knowledge sharing across the team.
What you’ll bring:
Essential
- Experience working within a high-volume payments, reconciliation or financial operations environment.
- Advanced Excel skills, including formulas, lookups and pivot tables, with the ability to manage and analyse large datasets.
- Experience using General Ledger or Finance systems, with a sound understanding of debits, credits and transaction matching.
- Strong attention to detail, analytical thinking and problem-solving capability.
- Excellent organisational skills with the ability to manage competing priorities effectively.
- A customer-focused approach and strong verbal and written communication skills.
- A proactive mindset, high levels of integrity and the confidence to identify and escalate issues appropriately.
- A willingness to learn, adapt and support continuous improvement initiatives.
Desirable
- Experience working within a banking or financial services environment.
- Awareness of Consumer Duty principles and financial services regulation.
- Studying towards an AAT qualification or similar.
- Currently studying towards AAT or an equivalent professional qualification.
Why join Castle Trust Bank?
- Competitive salary
- Performance bonus (based on individual and company performance)
- Generous contributory pension through Hargreaves Lansdown
- Life Assurance
- 25 days’ holiday + option to buy/sell 5 days
- Additional paid volunteering day
- Private healthcare through Equipsme (includes cash back for Dental and Optical treatment)
- Free access to BHSF Rise EAP to support colleague health and wellbeing
- Gym discounts
- Season ticket travel loans (if applicable)
- A supportive, inclusive culture where your work has real impact
Caught your attention? If so, we’d love to talk to you and tell you more about what it’s like to work at Castle Trust Bank - The Place To Work!
Castle Trust Bank is an equal opportunity employer where we celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all our colleagues to thrive. We welcome applications from all and will not discriminate against any status/characteristic protected by law and will always base our decisions on merit.
We are proud to support people with disabilities and are committed to be a Disability Confident employer. If you are a person with a disability and meet the minimum criteria for the role you will be offered an interview. Should you require any reasonable adjustment to support you in your application for one of our opportunities, please contact [email protected]
https://www.castletrust.co.uk/careers/who-we-are
Skills Required
- Experience working in a high-volume payments, reconciliation, or financial operations environment
- Advanced Excel skills, including formulas, lookups, pivot tables, and large-dataset analysis
- Experience using General Ledger or Finance systems
- Understanding of debits, credits, and transaction matching
- Strong attention to detail, analytical thinking, and problem-solving skills
- Excellent organizational skills and ability to manage competing priorities
- Customer-focused approach and strong verbal and written communication skills
- Proactive mindset, high integrity, and ability to identify and escalate issues
- Willingness to learn, adapt, and support continuous improvement initiatives
- Experience in banking or financial services
- Awareness of Consumer Duty principles and financial services regulation
- Studying toward an AAT qualification or equivalent professional qualification
What We Do
Traditional financial service providers are often burdened with costly overheads including expensive branch networks, inflexible technology and huge armies of people. At Castle Trust Bank, we keep our overheads to a minimum and we use savings proceeds to fund our lending solutions. In the past, we offered investment products to our customers which proved very popular. As a bank, we now offer savings accounts, giving our customers the added benefit of FSCS protection for their deposits. Our history means that we have a strong understanding of what our customers need and have built our savings range with those customers and their needs front of mind. In a complex world, we strive for openness and clarity. We place the highest importance on treating our customers fairly not just because it's the right thing to do but because we know that the trust of our customers is crucial to our future success. We recognise that for many mortgage customers, traditional solutions don't cut the mustard. These customers can often have high quality assets but unconventional income and so find it difficult to borrow at reasonable rates and on sensible terms. What experienced buy to let investors need is lending with imagination. They need a lender that recognises cash flow and net worth are not the same thing. They need a lender that is flexible in their approach and makes considered, logical decisions. Castle Trust Bank is that lender. We also offer point of sale finance through our Omni Capital Retail Finance arm. Partnering with retailers nationwide, we support their business by offering finance plans to their customers. OmniPort technology gives retailers paperless credit approval which fits seamlessly with their sales processes and customers can use our dedicated customer portal to keep up to date with their loans
