Market Expansion Lead - Financial Partnerships

About the Job

Xendit is going from a Southeast Asian payments provider to a global one. Every new market we want to sell in has to exist before it can be sold in: an entity, a licence or a licensed partner, bank accounts, and live rails. This role owns that.

You will help decide which markets we enter, build the case that gets them funded, choose whether we build, buy, or partner for the licence, and then run the entry end to end until the market is licensed, funded, connected, and handed over to a country commercial lead. You will do it as a repeatable playbook rather than a one-off project, so the second market is faster than the first and the fifth is faster than the second.

The role sits in Financial Partnerships and reports into its leadership, with direct exposure to the CRO and CEO, who sponsor this mandate. It carries no formal authority over the functions it depends on — Legal, Compliance, Risk, Corporate Secretarial, Treasury, Product, Finance — and every timeline you own runs through them. Influence, preparation, and follow-through are the job.

We are hiring this role at manager through lead level. We will scope the mandate, the market load, and the title to the person we hire rather than the other way around.

Responsibilities

• Market intelligence: Screen and rank candidate markets on market size, regulatory openness, payment rails, competitive density, and merchant demand. Maintain a live pipeline and a decision-ready entry book per market.
• Business case and investment decision: Build the cost-to-launch and cost-to-operate model, the revenue and margin projection, and the breakeven view. Take the go/no-go paper to leadership and defend it.
• Licensing strategy: Recommend build, buy, or partner per market. Select the licence type, shape the regulator engagement approach, and hold a coherent licensing roadmap across markets rather than a footprint we did not design.
• Foundational set-up: Drive entity incorporation, the licence application end to end, bank account opening, and scheme and rail access — executing with Corporate Secretarial, Legal, Compliance, and Treasury.
• Programme management: One timeline, one budget, one risk register per market. Convene the functions, hold them to dates, and escalate early and specifically when a gate is at risk.
• The playbook: Turn each entry into reusable artefacts — stage gates, application pack templates, a common business case model, a bank account approach, a handover checklist — and own the country-specific deviations.
• Handover: Support the hire of the country commercial lead, operationalise the licence with Compliance, and hand over against a defined readiness bar. Until every item on that bar is true, the market is still yours.

Minimum Qualifications

• 3+ years of experience running a complex cross-functional programme to a committed date — not only designing the plan, but landing it. Backgrounds that travel well here include top-tier management consulting, corporate development or strategy at a high-growth technology or financial services company, and programme leadership at a payments, banking, or fintech business.
• Working knowledge of payment regulation, banking, and payment infrastructure. You do not need to be a lawyer. You do need to hold a credible conversation with a regulator, a global bank, and our own Compliance team on the same day.
• Strong commercial and financial judgment: you can build the model, stress the assumptions, and say plainly when a market does not clear the bar.
• Exceptional written communication. Much of the output of this role is a paper that a CEO, a board, or a regulator reads without you in the room.
• A genuine global operator who translates across cultures and domains. Relationship building and regulator engagement in developed markets do not work the way they do in Southeast Asia, and this role has to work in both.
• A strong team player. This role has no line authority over the functions it depends on and has to earn its way through them.
• Comfort with ambiguity and with owning an outcome that is largely dependent on other people’s work.
• A Bachelor’s degree in an analytically rigorous discipline.

Preferred Qualifications

• Are more interested in the market going live than in the plan being elegant.
• Sequence properly: you establish whether we can be licensed, at what cost and by when, before anyone commits.
• Bring functions in at the start as inputs rather than at the end as approvers, and hold them to dates without turning it into a fight.
• Are willing to recommend a no-go on a market leadership is excited about, with the analysis to support it.
• Build things that outlast you: templates, models, and playbooks the next person inherits.
• Are energised by a fast pace, high accountability, and direct feedback.

Working Model

• Based in Singapore or Hong Kong.
• We expect team members in the office four days per week to support close collaboration and fast decisions.
• Travel of approximately 20–30%, to target markets, regulators, banks, and partners, weighted to the entries in flight.

Why Join Xendit?

• Most people who work on market entry do one market, once, inside a function. Here you own the whole sequence — the screen, the case, the licence, the accounts, the rails, the handover — and then you own it again in the next market, with the advantage of having built the playbook. It is one of the few roles where the scope of what you own is genuinely limited only by how fast you can make the machine work.
• If you want a defined lane inside an established process, this is not the role. If you want to build the capability that decides where a payments company can operate, we would like to hear from you.