Vice President, Global Payment Partnerships

American Express Digital Labs catalyzes digital innovation across the enterprise by originating, incubating, and scaling emerging products and platforms that are integral to our customers’ digital lives. We combine creativity, customer centricity, and technical excellence to reimagine how Card Members experience payments and membership in an increasingly digital world.

As a fast-moving, entrepreneurial team, we leverage emerging technologies to build differentiated digital payment solutions and engaging membership experiences. We work in close collaboration with leading technology companies and strategic partners to bring innovative products to market and extend the reach of the Amex ecosystem.

Amex Digital Labs is seeking a VP, Global Payment Partnerships to define how American Express participates in the next generation of digital payments. This leader will be responsible for shaping the strategy, product direction, and ecosystem engagement across wallets, tokenization, AI-enabled payments, and commerce platforms, and overseeing a team managing ongoing requirements for digital wallet management.  

Unlike traditional business development roles focused primarily on partner management and deal execution, this role will also work closely with the Product, and external partner leads. The successful candidate will influence roadmap decisions, shape platform capabilities, and ensure American Express wallet payment credentials can be seamlessly embedded across emerging commerce experiences. Partners in this portfolio include Apple, Google, PayPal, Meta, among others.

• Develop and execute partnership strategy, deal and contract needs, and manage partner ecosystem across wallet, PSP, and big tech ecosystem.
• Drive strategy and decisioning with Labs Product team and Partner organizations based on understanding technical requirements, tradeoffs and emerging tech.
• Identify emerging payment and wallet opportunities and prioritize partner roadmaps with an understanding of product resource and technical capabilities and a focus on accelerating product adoption and growth. 
• Define the long-term ecosystem strategy for wallets, tokenized payments, provisioning, and the portfolios AI-enabled payment experiences. 
• Solution with product organization, Lab’s Agentic Commerce team and external partners to develop strategic frameworks for how Amex cards in digital wallets participate in emerging AI and agentic commerce ecosystems. 
• Influence partner selection and go forward plans based on deep understanding of AXP and partner technical infrastructure.
• Lead relationships with strategic ecosystem partners including Apple, Google, Amazon, PayPal, and emerging commerce platforms. 
• Partner with Labs Product and AXP network teams to define APIs, tokenization approaches, identity models, and future ecosystem requirements. 
• Influence partner roadmaps and strategic product decisioning to inform go-forward wallet strategy and development.
• Build technical product partnership understanding across the organization. 

• 10+ years in partnerships, technology, product, or strategy roles.
• Understanding of payments, wallets, APIs, tokenization, and commerce platforms. 
• Ability to influence product strategy and technical roadmaps.
• Experience operating at the intersection of Product, Engineering, and external partners is ideal.
• Proven experience taking strategy through to execution. 
• Prior leadership experience hiring, coaching and leading a team to deliver work products. 
• Deep curiosity about emerging technologies and evolving business models.

Employment eligibility to work with American Express in the U.S is required as the company will not pursue visa sponsorship for these positions.