Consulting Director, Account Dedicated Team

About Us
Visa is a world leader in payments technology, facilitating transactions between consumers, merchants, financial institutions and government entities across more than 200 countries and territories, dedicated to uplifting everyone, everywhere by being the best way to pay and be paid.

At Visa, you'll have the opportunity to create impact at scale — tackling meaningful challenges, growing your skills and seeing your contributions impact lives around the world.

Join Visa and do work that matters – to you, to your community, and to the world. Progress starts with you.

Job Description

Team Summary

Visa Consulting & Analytics (VCA) drives tangible, impactful and financial results for Visa's clients, including card issuers, acquirers, and merchants. Drawing on our expertise in strategy consulting, data analytics, brand management, marketing, operations and macroeconomics, VCA solves the most strategic problems for our clients.

The VCA team within Japan provides a comprehensive range of consulting services and solutions to our clients in Japan that address unique challenges in areas such as strategic growth, profitability, digital strategy and customer experience. In VCA, the Account Dedicated Team plays a key role in enhancing the partnership with one of Visa Japan's largest clients and focuses on developing, implementing, and improving the client's business through close collaboration.

What a Consulting Director does

 A Consulting Director serves as the senior-most consumer payments consulting leader within an account-dedicated team and acts as a trusted advisor to senior client and Visa stakeholders. The role is responsible for shaping the client's consumer payments growth and transformation agenda, leading a portfolio of complex strategic engagements, and translating business priorities into measurable outcomes. The Director sets the direction across multiple workstreams, mobilizes cross-functional Visa capabilities, develops new consulting opportunities, and leverages deep expertise in consumer payments, card portfolio strategy, customer growth, and profitability improvement to deliver meaningful client and Visa business impact.

Why this is important to Visa

VCA's services allow our clients to boost their business performance by leveraging Visa's expansive market insights and data. This in turn drives Visa's business, creating a win-win relationship where both client and Visa's incentives are aligned to grow the business. This dynamic, combined with the long-term relationship we have with clients, enables a deeper level of engagement and impact compared with traditional consulting firms. VCA projects also help drive Visa Japan's strategic initiatives and accelerate Japan's transformation to a cashless society.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the strategic direction and end-to-end impact of a portfolio of complex account-dedicated engagements, with particular focus on consumer payments, translating client and Visa priorities into integrated programs and measurable outcomes.
• Serve as a trusted advisor to senior client executives and Visa leaders; proactively bring insights, options and recommendations that inform decisions, including in ambiguous, sensitive or high-stakes situations.
• Lead engagement and program design across multiple workstreams, defining objectives, scope, commercial approach, governance, deliverables, resourcing, dependencies, roles and success measures.
• Set the problem-solving approach and provide clear direction to consulting team members, data scientists, Hub teams and external partners; connect insights across workstreams into one coherent executive narrative.
• Take accountability for delivery quality and implementation impact, reviewing key analyses and deliverables, resolving escalations, and intervening where required to protect client value, timelines and Visa's reputation.
• Develop a robust fact base using client interviews, Visa and client data, market benchmarks and relevant global best practices; translate complex analysis into practical, executable recommendations.
• Mobilize One Visa capabilities across VCA, CRM, Product, Data Science, regional/global Hub teams and other functions, aligning objectives and resolving competing priorities to deliver integrated client solutions.
• Lead executive-level presentations, workshops, steering committees and difficult conversations; adapt messages to audience needs and build alignment for recommendations and implementation decisions.
• Own the development of a healthy consumer payments consulting pipeline by proactively identifying, shaping and converting follow-on opportunities; contribute to account strategy, develop proposals and commercial cases, and align opportunities with client priorities and Visa growth objectives.
• Manage engagement economics, scope and resource deployment in partnership with the account lead and relevant functions, maintaining accurate project governance, compliance and financial reporting.
• Provide day-to-day leadership, coaching and quality guidance to project teams, strengthening consulting skills, encouraging constructive debate and supporting team members' development
• Act as the go-to VCA advisor on consumer payments for the account, bringing a clear point of view on market developments and their implications. Build and share reusable intellectual property, methodologies and thought leadership that strengthen VCA's market credibility and delivery scalability.

This is a hybrid position. Expectation of days in the office will be confirmed by your Hiring Manager. 

Qualifications

What you need

• Full professional proficiency in Japanese and business-level English
• Typically 12 or more years of relevant experience, including a strong track record in strategy consulting, management consulting, corporate strategy or an equivalent client-facing leadership role.
• Demonstrated ability to lead multiple complex engagements or workstreams concurrently, set priorities under ambiguity and remain accountable for outcomes.
• Proven success building trusted relationships with senior executives, influencing decisions and handling challenging stakeholder situations.
• Strong One Visa leadership, with the ability to align cross-functional and geographically distributed teams, resolve conflicts and create an inclusive, high-performing environment.
• Exceptional structured problem-solving and analytical rigor, with the ability to set the overall approach, challenge hypotheses and synthesize multiple analyses into a clear strategic narrative.
• Ability to identify the critical issues across an engagement portfolio, make sound trade-offs, and guide teams in validating hypotheses through data and stakeholder engagement.
• Strong commercial and business acumen, including the ability to connect client value, Visa business impact, engagement economics and implementation feasibility.
• Proven ability to translate analytics into actionable recommendations and compelling executive communications, tailored to decision makers at different levels.
• Demonstrated accountability for delivery excellence, including quality assurance, customer experience, scope control and high standards for client-ready outputs.
• Excellent executive communication, storytelling, facilitation, negotiation and presentation skills.
• Demonstrated ability to shape new solutions and proposals by combining client needs, Visa assets, market insight and emerging technology.
• Strong commitment to customer impact, Visa's business and technology innovation, with the judgment and resilience required for a senior client-facing role.
• Intellectual curiosity and a consistent commitment to learning, knowledge sharing and developing others.

What will also help

• Significant experience in consumer payments, cards, retail banking, financial services, technology or related ecosystems.
• Strong understanding of the end-to-end consumer payments landscape and the economics, operating models and stakeholder ecosystem of financial institutions. Experience with consumer payment portfolio growth, customer lifecycle management, profitability transformation or consumer payment programs is highly desirable.
• Experience leading implementation-heavy, digital, data or technology-enabled transformation programs; formal project or program management certification is beneficial

Visa is an EEO Employer

Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability or protected veteran status. Visa will also consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with EEOC guidelines and applicable local law.