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.
Reporting to the VP Growth Ops & Partnerships with a dotted line to the VP Operations APAC, you will collaborate with cross-functional teams (Product, Finance, Compliance, etc.) to translate global strategy into local execution. 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. The Regional Partner Relations Lead elevates these relationships through senior-level access, cross-market pattern recognition, and centralized negotiation leverage — it does not replace or bypass CM relationships.
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.
What skills do you need?
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: Must have a proven track record of managing partner relationships across 3+ Asian markets simultaneously. Single-market experience alone is insufficient.
Experience on the processor, acquirer, or PSP side of the value chain — particularly in payin / payout routing, approval rate optimization, or multi-provider resilience — is a strong advantage.
Proven track record owning senior relationships with at least one of the following:
Major banks, wallets, processors or PSPs.
Card schemes (e.g., Visa, Mastercard).
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 ; comfortable using tools, dashboards and reports to do so.
Automation and process mindset: able to spot opportunities to streamline partner management (e.g., standardizing playbooks, improving reporting, or collaborating on tooling/automation to reduce manual work and errors).
Excellent communicator in English (Advanced, mandatory) – both written and verbal – with the ability to adapt messaging to C‑level, operational and regulatory audiences.
Language Skills: Mandarin Chinese proficiency (spoken and written) is strongly preferred given the importance of Chinese-speaking partners, processors, and financial institutions across the APAC corridor, including Greater China-linked payment flows. Additional Asian languages are a strong plus.
High ownership and bias to action: you move from problem to plan to execution, are comfortable with ambiguity and incomplete information, and can operate with limited day-to-day guidance.
Ability to navigate complex organizations, internally and externally, aligning diverse stakeholders around clear, measurable outcomes.
Exposure to BNPL, wallets, RTP and alternative payment methods strategies in emerging markets.
Prior experience interacting with Asian regulators, central banks or industry associations.
Nice to have
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What We Do
dLocal started with one goal – to close the payments innovation gap between global enterprise companies, and customers in emerging economies. We have over 900 payment methods, in more than 40 countries. With the ability to accept local payment methods and facilitate cross-border fund settlement worldwide, our merchants reach billions of underserved consumers in the high-growth markets of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. dLocal offers the ideal payment solutions for global commerce: Payins: Accept local payment methods Payouts: Compliantly send funds cross-border Defense Suite: Manage fraud effectively dLocal for Platforms: Unify your platform’s payment solution Local Issuing: Localize payments for your gig-economy workers, suppliers, and partners
