Building the MSOps payments division

Sportserve ran payment launches across 12 countries, and every launch touched Product, Engineering, Compliance, Creative, Customer Support, and external payment providers. Each team could see its own piece clearly; nobody had a view of the whole sequence.

Launches kept slipping, and fixing them one at a time was a reasonable response, since each delay had its own specific cause. Looking across the portfolio, though, the same pattern kept repeating, which pointed at something structural: no system connected the people who had to work together to ship a launch.

From inside any one department that was invisible. It simply looked like a slow launch.

Solving launches one at a time would have meant solving them forever. I made the case to leadership for a standalone payments division inside MSOps (Marketing Services Operations), built from zero, rather than another workaround.

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 whole portfolio, not any single launch. If the system was working, every launch would get faster and cleaner, not only the ones I was close to. That was the honest test of whether the constraint was structural.

I hired the initial team of 5 and defined the operating model: Agile sprint cycles, RACI models for ownership clarity, centralized project tracking, and a centralized project tracking system, and a prioritization framework that sequenced launches by market impact rather than by who asked first.

I wrote 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 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.