Unitary Transformation Lead - Public Sector Payments

We're looking for people to join the Access family, who share our passion for believing in better, and who will help us continue to grow. Love Work. Love Life. Be You. - is central to our success and how we give our customers the freedom to do more of what's important to them.

We offer a blended approach to office working, encouraging you to collaborate and connect in one of our thriving offices. We deliver on what we say, taking the development of our people seriously. We'll work with you to progress your success plan and provide opportunities to accelerate your career. On top of a competitive salary, our wellbeing days taking you to 25 days leave a year and a health contribution, you'll also be able to choose from a range of benefits to suit you. We're an organisation that likes to give back, so you'll also have three charity days allocated to support a cause that matters to you.

At Access, we love software and how technology never stays the same. It's this obsession that drives us to work closely across sectors to understand the business needs of our customers - from the Hospitality sector to Manufacturing industry to Not for Profit's to Construction, and many more. We're passionate about helping our customers stay one step ahead of the challenges facing their industry and business, currently helping over 60,000 customers to have the freedom to do more.

About you:

Access is seeking a Unitary Transformation Practice Lead to join our dynamic Growth Operations team, reporting to the Director, Growth Operations. This is a newly created, standalone role sitting at the heart of the PaySuite division's Public Sector strategy, making PaySuite a trusted partner in the local government reorganisation currently reshaping the UK's public sector.

You will be PaySuite's primary point of expertise on the payments-specific challenges of LGR, being a partner that is in the room early, understands the council's specific situation, and works collaboratively to identify the right Payments approach for the Unitary's journey.

You will develop and agree PaySuite's Unitary framework approach, liaising with all impacted and contributed functions across the division, to enable us to deliver a customer engagement model that both supports a Unitary through the Payments element of their transformation and achieves the right commercially packaged offering for their organisation.

Alongside direct customer engagement, the Practice Lead will build the internal capability, tools and frameworks that allow the rest of the business to operate confidently in this space - and will do so in a way that creates genuine, lasting expertise across the organisation rather than a single point of dependency.

Day-to-day, you will:

• Customer Engagement and Advisory: Attend early-stage meetings with forming unitary authorities to understand their specific structure, timeline, legacy systems, and political context - typically before any commercial discussion is on the table.
• Work collaboratively with councils to map their payments transformation options, identify the right sequencing, and navigate the trade-offs between immediate consolidation and a phased approach.
• Act as a credible peer in pre-sales and new business conversations - providing assurance about the implementation journey ahead and reducing risk perception at the point of commitment.
• Support sales and account management colleagues in identifying and qualifying unitary-related opportunities across the existing customer base and new prospects.
• In conjunction with Marketing, lead the design and delivery of a PaySuite webinar series on unitary transformation - covering the transformation horizons councils face, practical considerations for payments and income management through each stage, sequencing decisions, common failure modes, and what good looks like at each point.
• Represent PaySuite in external-facing activity - roundtables, webinars, peer forums - on income management through the unitary transition, that build PaySuite's presence and reputation in this space.

• Framework and Tooling: Design and own a structured Unitary Discovery Framework, liaising with colleagues across functions, to build a consistent mechanism for capturing each authority's situation, constraints, and priorities, which customer-facing colleagues can use and build on.
• Develop recommended delivery pathways for the two primary scenarios: authorities seeking immediate consolidation of systems and processes, and those prioritising a stable day one with phased rationalisation to follow.
• Define clear roles and responsibilities within a unitary engagement for internal stakeholders - from first contact through to post-go-live - so that accountability is clear and the Practice Lead is not a bottleneck.
• Build and maintain a delivery template covering the full arc of a unitary implementation: engagement and scoping, sequencing, data migration, go-live support, and post-go-live stabilisation.
• Establish operating guardrails for the role - criteria for when to engage, what a good outcome per interaction looks like, and how handoffs to delivery teams are managed - to prevent the role becoming high-volume and low-outcome.
• Define a specific model for Elevate customers (PaySuite's most strategically important accounts), covering how unitary transformation engagement is structured differently for this tier.

• Internal Capability Building: Design and deliver a training programme for all customer-facing functions - sales, account management, delivery, and customer success - so that colleagues can speak confidently about the unitary landscape, the challenges councils face, and where PaySuite can and cannot help.
• Create and maintain reference materials that non-specialists can use independently in customer conversations without needing to involve the Practice Lead directly.
• Identify and develop two or three individuals across the business to carry unitary expertise forward, removing single-point-of-failure risk and embedding institutional knowledge over time.

• Implementation Oversight: Act as subject matter expert and senior point of oversight on the first unitary implementations delivered under the new framework, setting the standard for how PaySuite operates in this context.
• Ensure the first cohort of implementations produces a validated, repeatable model - not a bespoke delivery each time.
• Transition direct implementation responsibility to trained colleagues as the model matures, moving into a quality assurance and escalation function.

• Proposition Development: Work with the Director, Growth Operations and Product & Engineering to contribute to the evolution of the PaySuite unitary proposition - ensuring it reflects what authorities actually need and is grounded in real engagement.
• Over time, contribute to the case for packaging the unitary partnership offering commercially, with evidence drawn from customer outcomes and delivery experience.
• From Year Two, carry a commercial contribution objective covering revenue retained from existing authorities going through unitary transition, and new unitary business influenced.

Your skills and experiences might also include:

• Direct, hands-on experience of income management or payments transformation within a UK local authority - ideally through a major change programme or system transition.
• A solid working understanding of how councils are structured financially and operationally, including the roles of S151 officers, finance directors, and transformation leads.