Product Director – Finance

Wise is a global technology company, building the best way to move and manage the world’s money. Min fees. Max ease. Full speed. Whether people and businesses are sending money to another country, spending abroad, or making and receiving international payments, Wise is on a mission to make their lives easier and save them money.

Your mission is to help create an entirely new network for the world’s money. You will build and maintain the foundational financial platform that guarantees the integrity and compliance of every transaction across Wise’s global ecosystem. The systems you own secure the integrity of over £40bn in monthly financial flow across all of Wise.

Within the Finance Product team, you will lead the Accounting and Operations workstream, which is the architect of financial truth at Wise. You will operate as the foundational service provider that guarantees the integrity of every record of movement of money across the Wise ecosystem.

Your team’s systems are the single source of consumable financial data (the ledger of record) that underpins all critical downstream functions, including regulatory reporting, tax filing, and strategic decision-making by executive leadership.

You will be leading the vision for a ledgering system currently processing over 1bn+ journal entries a month and supporting a sustained throughput of 200k events per minute. You will also own the Finance processes around:

• Accounting business processes
• AR/AP and Payouts

The core questions that you will answer in your role are:

• How do you build systems and controls that ensure completeness and accuracy of financial flows?
• How do you eliminate operational risks from financial processes?

You will define and execute the product strategy to achieve real-time reconciliation and assurance at global scale, providing functional finance teams with systems they need to operate effectively, compliantly, and efficiently in 50+ countries.

You are joining the Finance Product team at a pivotal, hyper-growth stage as Wise prepares to list in the US. The Finance team is strategically expanding its footprint to raise the bar on global regulatory maturity and provide a robust financial foundation for Wise’s sustained, rapid growth. This expansion is directly driven by the need to proactively mature our global financial controls and infrastructure to meet the highest standards required of a US-listed, global financial technology company.

Qualifications

• Understanding of finance systems in either an engineering, data or product role
• Understanding of operating in Finance organisations including financial reporting, commercials, and risk and controls
• Multiple years of product building experience, either as a product, engineering or operations leader in a hands-on role
• Strong individual contributor, willing to get your hands dirty and build product yourself
• Typically will have a background that shows they have a superpower (engineer, analyst, consultant, financial, serial entrepreneur, etc)
• Held multiple product roles, and can draw on different experiences and roles when forming opinions and executing
• A willingness and capability to dive into the technical architecture, engaging directly with engineers to influence ledger design, data models, and event-sourcing patterns
• Have defined and moved KPIs with features shipped
• Have built roadmaps for teams finding a path from uncertainty/chaos to clarity

Leadership

• Enthusiasm for the Wise mission is essential – empathy for the problem we are solving and the fire to build something with no precedent
• Flexible in approach – not stuck to a “by the book” product role definition
• Understands how to grow existing team members as well as hiring and onboarding team members
• Enthusiastic about learning new skills to unblock yourself and your team

Problem Solving

• Analytically-minded, can clearly frame problems, articulate hypotheses and solutions, measure them and has used the tools to be able to do this without an analyst
• Showcases system-level thinking, a proven ability to look beyond the scope of a single product to design interconnected systems

Nice-to-haves

• Finance, Payments or Treasury experience particularly in Ledgers, Controls or Accounting
• Experience with SOx Controls or Audits
• Experience of third party finance systems