Senior Lawyer - Merchant Services Banking Products - BCB & CIB

TITLE: Senior Lawyer - Merchant Services (Banking Products - BCB & CIB Legal)

LOCATIONS: Edinburgh, Leeds, Halifax, Bristol, Chester or Cardiff

HOURS: Full time

WORKING PATTERN: Hybrid, 40% (or two days a week) at one of our Legal Hubs

We are looking for a Senior Lawyer to join the Banking Products team in Business and Commercial Banking and Corporate and Institutional Banking Legal.

The successful candidate will be someone who delivers influential insight, engages proactively with senior stakeholders and the Legal & Secretariat Community and operates as a subject matter specialist. The role will also include delegated line management responsibilities.

Banking Products Legal plays a critical role in supporting the Bank's strategy. This role will focus on legal support for merchant services solutions to small businesses, larger corporate customers, governmental bodies and local authorities. We work closely with colleagues in Product, Coverage, our transformational Platform teams and Delivery plus other functional support areas.

The products and services we support are merchant acquiring, payment gateways, partnerships, digital innovations including embedded finance payment methods and online digital channels through which our products and services are provided to clients.

Our team provides legal and advice support in relation to product development and innovation, negotiation of commercial contracts, legal and regulatory change projects, rectifications and remediations, industry change initiatives, customer on-boarding, end-to-end customer journeys and the management of legal risk. The merchant services business has a programme of strategic growth so a really exciting time to be part of the legal team supporting this.

The place to be!

You will be part of a truly supportive team working on core and innovative products and helping to find legal solutions to support strategy. We like to challenge the status quo and help drive continuous improvement activity.

This role will require a good understanding of the legal, regulatory framework applicable to payments and strong commercial contracts experience.

In this role, you will …
• Operate as a specialist legal advisor in relation to merchant services matters including providing legal input to support delivery of projects, innovation and product developments and rectifications.
• Advise on and draft terms and conditions for contracts relates to merchant services and associated services
• Negotiate with customers and suppliers in related to customised agreements;
• support legal, regulatory and change projects across Business and Commercial Banking and Corporate and Institutional Banking Legal and Legal & Secretariat
• proactively identify, report and call out legal and governance risks and recommend solutions as required
• Advise on customer and colleague journey enhancements
• Build and maintain a strong stakeholder network to ensure there is a good understanding of business strategy and pipeline and use that knowledge to help prioritise team activity
• Manage use of panel law firms and build and maintain strong relationships with external lawyers
• Help run the team by monitoring our service delivery, finding opportunities to improve the way we work and training the team and our business.

Seeking a positive and versatile individual who can..
• Build strong collaborative relationships across Legal and Secretariat and the business to support delivery of strategy
• Be confident in using your experience and insights to influence, inform and challenge business stakeholders
• Help identify, mitigate and control legal risk weakness
• Manage your own workload priorities and support more junior colleagues to do the same
• Stay on top of and share regulatory, industry and legal change with our team and business
• Demonstrate commitment to self-development and the development of colleagues
• Bring enthusiasm and curiosity to the role.

Skills/background
• Qualified as a solicitor in the UK (or equivalent qualification) ideally with experience of payment services regulations, transaction banking services generally, commercial contracts and/or merchant services.
• Experience in developing and coaching others
• People orientated.

We also offer a wide-ranging benefits package, which includes:
• A generous pension contribution of up to 15%
• An annual performance-related bonus
• Share schemes including free shares
• Benefits you can adapt to your lifestyle, such as discounted shopping
• 30 days' holiday, with bank holidays on top
• A range of wellbeing initiatives and generous parental leave policies

What we can offer you

You'll enjoy our dedication to your ongoing personal and professional development. We'll help you perform at your best today, so you can fulfil all your potential in the future. We're committed to building a workforce which reflects the diversity of the customer and communities we serve, and to building an inclusive environment where all our colleagues can be themselves and succeed on merit. We're an equal opportunity employer and deeply value diversity within our organisation.

We'll ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us to request accommodation.

As part of the Group's commitments as a result of ring-fencing legislation, colleagues based in the Islands are required to be exclusively dedicated to the non-ring-fenced bank and its subsidiaries. This means that colleagues who are based in the Islands would not be able to undertake roles for the Ring Fenced Bank from their existing location and would need to consider relocation when applying for roles.

So if you have the skills we're seeking and you're looking for your next step, we'd love to hear from you.