Principal Customer Success Manager

A Principal Customer Success Manager (PCSM) must be a proactive self-starter who maintains an owner's mindset toward their client portfolio. The core of this role involves partnering closely with clients to identify and meet their specific business objectives, ensuring they derive maximum value from our solutions. Through this proactive support, a PCSM effectively drives customer satisfaction, product adoption, long-term retention, and revenue expansion. Furthermore, managing banking clients requires a specialised skill set that extends beyond standard relationship management. Because banks operate in highly complex, heavily regulated environments with stringent security protocols and extended adoption cycles, it is vital that a candidate possesses a good understanding of these unique institutional challenges to be successful.

What you will do

• Develop strong relationships with our clients by maintaining a high level of engagement, aligning business objectives, and providing raving fan service.
• Maintain a deep understanding of our solutions, client base, and best practices.
• Act as a trusted advisor and advocate for the client, ensuring success and maximum value as they adopt a new platform/service.
• Educate clients on business value of solutions and application of best practices.
• Provide business insights through client value presentations, Quarterly Business Reviews, and other methods.
• Identify potential growth and upsell opportunities to expand revenue, engaging the Account Executive at the appropriate time to hand off the opportunity.
• Assess customer health by monitoring product usage, reported issues, and other success metrics.
• Act as a liaison between internal COE teams to ensure customer needs are being met and to create solutions to client pain points; coordinating amongst technology, sales, marketing, finance, and product teams.
• Identify trends and relay feedback internally to appropriately address underlying issues.
• Provide clients full transparency on status of issues/requests from submission through resolution, working across teams and driving the escalation process as needed.
• Actively participate in the customer life cycle process, from prospect to renewal.
• Participate in CSM programme development and improvement activities.
• Facilitate customer account changes, product set up and billing research/corrections.
• Work with Sales and other Learning & Development teams to facilitate customer training as needed.

What experience you need

• Strong experience in a Customer Success, Account Management, or other Client-Facing role.
• Bachelor’s degree (or higher) required, or the equivalent years of industry experience.
• Ability to troubleshoot and solve business and basic technical problems.
• Requirement for a foundational understanding of banking regulations (e.g., GDPR, FCA guidelines).
• Ability to effectively manage daily client communications, including escalations and problem management situations.
• Banks are heavily siloed. A successful banking CSM must be adept at building consensus across multiple departments, including IT, Information Security, Legal, Procurement, and the actual business line users.
• Must be able to work autonomously and collaborate as part of a team.
• Change moves slowly in financial institutions due to necessary risk and compliance checks. The candidate needs exceptional patience and project management skills to keep momentum alive over a 12-to-18-month adoption process.
• Ability to travel occasionally (up to 25% of the time).

What could set you apart

• Possesses strong analytical skills, process improvement and project management capabilities a plus.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, including formal as well as informal client and internal presentations.
• Exhibits confidence and is calm under pressure.
• Understand the end-to-end banking customer journey, from customer acquisition and loan origination to account management and collections.
• A good working knowledge of financial regulations (such as FCA guidelines, GDPR, KYC/AML rules, and Fair Lending practices) to understand the constraints and pressures their clients face.