Senior Payments Analyst
The Senior Payments Analyst analyzes payment flows in a high-risk vertical, including deposit and withdrawal conversion, declines, chargebacks, and payment economics, and proposes solutions to improve them.
What a Senior Payments Analyst does
The Senior Payments Analyst is responsible for data on money movement in the product: deposits, withdrawals, provider declines, refunds, and disputed transactions. In betting and gambling, the payment stack directly affects revenue and player retention, so companies keep a dedicated analytics role for payments rather than splitting this work between marketing and support.
The role sits within finance or payments and usually reports to the Head of Payments or the payments lead. The senior analyst owns key areas independently, and their analysis supports provider management, the risk team, and finance. Sometimes they also prepare materials for leadership on decisions about new payment methods or changing acquirers.
The work consists of regular monitoring of payment success by method, country, and provider, analysis of conversion drops, and preparation of findings with concrete recommendations. The senior is responsible for making sure the numbers reconcile across payment systems, accounting, and regulatory reporting.
Responsibilities
- Run daily monitoring of deposit and withdrawal success by payment method, country, provider, and currency
- Analyze conversion drops and declines, and identify root causes on the product side, the provider side, or in risk rules
- Build and maintain end-to-end analytics of the payment funnel, from attempt to credited funds
- Analyze chargebacks, disputes, and refunds, and identify fraud patterns together with the risk team
- Calculate payment economics: provider fees, acquiring costs, and margin by payment method
- Prepare recommendations on routing changes, onboarding of new payment methods, and revisions of limits
- Reconcile payment system data with accounting and financial reports, and identify discrepancies
- Take part in evaluating and testing new providers and in A/B tests of the player payment experience
- Produce regular reporting for leadership and, when needed, for partners and auditors
Skills
- Advanced SQL, including complex queries, joins, and window functions
- Understanding of the payment transaction lifecycle and provider decline codes
- Knowledge of acquiring and processing structures and the role of the PSP
- Working with financial models and calculating payment unit economics
- Ability to build funnels, cohorts, and segmentations by payment method
- Data visualization and presenting findings to non-analysts
- Communicating with providers, accounting, and the risk team in their terms
- Prioritization: separating incidents that need immediate response from planned optimization
- General understanding of regulatory requirements for payments and KYC/AML
Tools
- SQL clients and data warehouses (for example, BigQuery, ClickHouse, or PostgreSQL)
- BI tools for dashboards (Tableau, Power BI, Looker, Metabase)
- Spreadsheets and financial models (Excel, Google Sheets)
- Payment provider back offices and PSP dashboards
- Task management systems (Jira, Notion, Confluence)
- Python scripts for data exports and reconciliations (as needed)
How performance is measured
- Deposit and withdrawal conversion by key methods and countries
- Share of declines by reason and the trend in reducing them
- Chargeback and dispute rate relative to payment volume
- Accuracy of payment data reconciliation with accounting
- Cost per payment and change in margin after implemented changes
- Time from detecting a problem to diagnosing it and proposing a solution
By vertical
Betting
In betting, payments run in short cycles: deposits before bets and fast withdrawals after settlements. The analyst pays particular attention to withdrawal delays and to the link between payment declines and player behavior on lines and in live betting.
Gambling
In online casinos, there are more small transactions and a higher share of cryptocurrencies and alternative methods. The analyst more often works on fraud, complex money laundering schemes, regulatory requirements for source of funds, and the cost of wrongly blocking loyal players.
Levels
Senior
The senior independently runs payment analytics for the area, formulates hypotheses without being given tasks, is accountable for findings presented to leadership and for consistency of data across systems. They mentor junior analysts and take part in decisions about providers and routing.
How to get there
People usually enter the profession from adjacent analytical roles: an analyst in fintech, bank processing, e-commerce, or gambling, where they already worked with transactional data. A background in finance, accounting, or operational analytics also works if you have confident SQL skills and an understanding of money flows.
To prepare, it is worth mastering SQL at the level of analytical queries, understanding how acquiring, PSPs, and decline codes work, learning to calculate payment unit economics, and building dashboards. It is useful to understand the basics of KYC and AML and to be able to explain them to the product team in plain language.
Growth comes through independently owning an area: from analyzing individual incidents to owning metrics for payment methods, then to responsibility for providers and payment economics. The move to senior is usually marked by the ability to influence decisions without direct management authority and by confidence in the data that leadership sees.
Next steps: Lead Payments Analyst, Payments Team Lead, Head of Payments, Finance Business Partner, Head of Payments Analytics
FAQ
How does a Senior Payments Analyst differ from a regular analyst?
A senior independently runs the payments area, formulates questions and hypotheses, is accountable for findings presented to leadership, and for reconciling data across systems. A regular analyst more often carries out specific tasks and queries set by a more senior colleague.
Do you need to know programming?
Confident SQL is mandatory, since working with transactional data is almost impossible without it. Python is useful for exports, reconciliations, and automation, but in most teams it is not the main requirement.
What determines income in this role?
Income depends on region, company size, the volume of payment flow, and how much the role affects revenue and risk management. A large part of the salary range is determined by the ability to prove the economic impact of decisions.
What experience is needed to move into gambling or betting?
Experience working with transactional data in fintech, bank processing, or e-commerce helps. The vertical's specifics (player limits, regulatory requirements, fraud) can be learned on the job if the core skills are already in place.
How does this role differ from a Risk Analyst?
A Payments Analyst looks at payment efficiency and economics, while a Risk Analyst focuses on assessing threats and blocking rules. In practice the roles are closely connected, and a good payments analyst helps risk tune rules without losing conversion.
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