Country Manager

Country Manager – Malaysia

We are proud to be partnering with our client, a leading fintech and payments organisation with an ambitious regional growth strategy and a strong focus on developing innovative payment solutions across Asia. With Malaysia identified as a strategically important market, the organisation is looking to appoint a Country Manager who will take full ownership of its local operations, regulatory engagement, partnerships and payment ecosystem strategy.

This is a highly entrepreneurial and execution-driven mandate, requiring an individual who can combine deep knowledge of the Malaysian payments landscape with strong commercial and stakeholder management capabilities. The successful candidate will play a pivotal role in building and scaling the organisation's presence in Malaysia, while developing new domestic and cross-border payment flows to support its continued growth.

Position Overview

Reporting to the regional leadership team, the Country Manager will have end-to-end responsibility for driving the organisation's Malaysia strategy, spanning regulatory engagement, ecosystem development, commercial partnerships, payment infrastructure and local team leadership.

A key component of the role will be establishing and managing strategic relationships across the Malaysian payments ecosystem, including banks, payment service providers, acquirers, aggregators, e-wallet providers and relevant industry infrastructure. The individual will be expected to identify opportunities, negotiate commercial arrangements, drive integrations and continuously optimise the organisation's payment capabilities.

The role will also serve as a key interface with Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM) and other relevant regulatory stakeholders, ensuring that the business remains fully aligned with local licensing, compliance and reporting requirements.

This is a build-and-run mandate, rather than a relationship-management role. The successful candidate will be expected to identify opportunities, make decisions, execute partnerships and take ownership of the performance and scalability of Malaysia's payment ecosystem.

Key Responsibilities

In this strategic leadership role, you will be responsible for shaping and executing the organisation's Malaysia market strategy, with particular emphasis on regulatory leadership, payment partnerships and ecosystem development. You will build and maintain strong relationships with BNM and other regulatory stakeholders, ensuring adherence to applicable regulatory frameworks, licensing requirements and reporting obligations.

You will own the full lifecycle of Malaysia's payment partnerships, from mapping the ecosystem and identifying priority partners through to commercial negotiations, integration, go-live and ongoing performance management. This will include developing relationships across banks, PayNet, PSPs, acquirers, aggregators and e-wallet providers, while identifying gaps in existing payment rails and sourcing new partners to enhance coverage, reliability, settlement speed and cost efficiency.

A significant part of the mandate will involve leading commercial negotiations end-to-end, including pricing, MDR and fee structures, settlement terms, minimum volume commitments, exclusivity, SLAs, liability and chargeback arrangements. Working closely with legal and compliance teams, you will ensure that partnership structures are commercially competitive while protecting margins and meeting regulatory and internal risk requirements.

You will also oversee the delivery of partner integrations across major Malaysian payment rails, includingDuitNow, FPX, e-wallets, card schemes and bank APIs.Working closely with product and engineering teams, you will own integration roadmaps, remove delivery blockers and establish robust testing, reconciliation and go-live processes.

Post-integration, you will remain accountable for partner performance, monitoring key metrics such as uptime, transaction success rates and settlement timeliness. You will act as the escalation point for critical partner issues and continuously optimise payment routing and the partner mix to improve reliability, reduce costs and strengthen resilience.

The role will further require you to identify and develop new payment solutions and use cases, including domestic and cross-border payment flows, new payout methods and real-time payment capabilities. You will stay abreast of developments across the Malaysian payments ecosystem and translate regulatory, infrastructure and technology changes into new commercial and product opportunities.

Finally, you will build, mentor and lead a high-performing local team, fostering a culture of accountability, innovation, commercial ownership and compliance-first thinking.

The Successful Applicant

The ideal candidate is a seasoned payments or fintech leader with a strong understanding of the Malaysian financial services and regulatory landscape, particularly the role of Bank Negara Malaysia and the regulatory framework governing payment businesses.

You will bring a demonstrable track record of managing pay-in and pay-out partnerships in Malaysia, with hands-on experience working with banks, PSPs, acquirers, aggregators, e-wallets and/or payment infrastructure providers. Importantly, you will have the commercial capability to take partnerships from initial strategy and sourcing through negotiation, integration and ongoing optimisation.

You will ideally have 8+ years of experience across fintech, payments or financial services, including at least five years in a leadership capacity. Experience designing or optimising domestic and cross-border payment flows will be highly advantageous, as will exposure to major Malaysian payment rails such as DuitNow and FPX.

Strong stakeholder management and influencing skills are essential, with the ability to engage credibly with regulators, banks, technology partners and senior internal stakeholders. You will be commercially astute, analytically minded and comfortable negotiating complex commercial arrangements while balancing cost, scalability, reliability and regulatory considerations.

The successful candidate will be an entrepreneurial, hands-on and execution-oriented leader who thrives in a fast-paced, high-growth environment. You will be comfortable operating with ambiguity, building infrastructure and partnerships from the ground up, and taking ownership for outcomes rather than simply managing relationships.

Celine Tay

Executive Director – Executive Search

Email: [Confidential Information]

Company EA Licence No: 24S2548

Personnel Registration Number: R1113056