Building the Payments Operations Division

Sportserve operated payment launches across 12 countries, and every launch touched Product, Engineering, Compliance, Creative, Customer Support, and external payment providers. None of that was coordinated. Each team only saw their own piece of the work.

Launches kept slipping and the instinct around me was to fix each launch as it came up. I looked past the individual launches and saw the same failure pattern repeating every time. The problem was never any single launch. It was that no system existed to connect the people who had to work together to ship one.

Nobody had named that gap, because from inside any one department it just looked like a slow launch.

Fixing one launch at a time would have meant doing this forever. I decided the business needed a dedicated function, not another workaround, and made the case to leadership for a standalone Payments Operations Division built from zero.

I designed it as an internal agency model: one team owning project management, B2C campaign execution, B2B onboarding coordination, creative production, vendor management, and customer issue resolution for everything payments-related, across all 12 markets.

Launch throughput and production error rate across the full portfolio of launches, not any single one. If the system was working, every launch would get faster and cleaner, not just the ones I personally touched. That was the only way to prove the diagnosis was right: that the problem was systemic, not isolated.

I hired the initial team of 5 from scratch and defined the operating model myself: Agile sprint cycles, RACI models for ownership clarity, centralized project tracking, and a data-driven prioritization framework that sequenced launches by market impact instead of whoever asked loudest.

I built the SOPs, the QA processes, and the standardized launch templates so the team could execute consistently without me in every decision. Then I traveled to new regional offices to train local teams in person, since the model only worked if it held up the same way in every market.

The division sat inside the broader MSOps department, which grew from 5 to 36 over the same stretch as four other leads built out their own divisions in parallel. That wider growth wasn’t my build. The 5-person division was.