Product Owner - Director

SMBC Group is a top-tier global financial group. Headquartered in Tokyo and with a 400-year history, SMBC Group offers a diverse range of financial services, including banking, leasing, securities, credit cards, and consumer finance. The Group has more than 130 offices and 80,000 employees worldwide in nearly 40 countries. Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group, Inc. (SMFG) is the holding company of SMBC Group, which is one of the three largest banking groups in Japan. SMFG’s shares trade on the Tokyo, Nagoya, and New York (NYSE: SMFG) stock exchanges.

In the Americas, SMBC Group has a presence in the US, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Peru. Backed by the capital strength of SMBC Group and the value of its relationships in Asia, the Group offers a range of commercial and investment banking services to its corporate, institutional, and municipal clients. It connects a diverse client base to local markets and the organization’s extensive global network. The Group’s operating companies in the Americas include Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp. (SMBC), SMBC Nikko Securities America, Inc., SMBC Capital Markets, Inc., SMBC MANUBANK, JRI America, Inc., SMBC Leasing and Finance, Inc., Banco Sumitomo Mitsui Brasileiro S.A., and Sumitomo Mitsui Finance and Leasing Co., Ltd.

The anticipated salary range for this role is between $166,000.00 and $210,000.00. The specific salary offered to an applicant will be based on their individual qualifications, experiences, and an analysis of the current compensation paid in their geography and the market for similar roles at the time of hire. The role may also be eligible for an annual discretionary incentive award. In addition to cash compensation, SMBC offers a competitive portfolio of benefits to its employees.

Role Description

The Director, Product Owner will lead the strategy, governance, prioritization, and agile delivery of digital transaction banking capabilities within Treasury Services. This role will own a capability domain across digital channels, payments, entitlements, security administration and related platform experiences. The Product Owner will translate business strategy, client needs, regulatory expectations, operational requirements, and technology constraints into a clear product roadmap, healthy backlog, and release-ready requirements.

The role will partner closely with Technology, UX/UI, Architecture, Operations, Risk, Compliance, Legal, Sales, Servicing, Data and regional stakeholders to deliver secure, scalable, measurable, and client-centered digital banking experiences across portal, API, host-to-host, and future channel capabilities.

Role Objectives: Delivery

Agile Delivery

- Own backlog health, prioritization, sprint readiness, dependency management, testing readiness, release governance, production validation, and post-release monitoring.

- Translate capability strategy into epics, features, user stories, acceptance criteria, process flows, business rules, non-functional requirements, and release-ready requirements.

- Lead backlog refinement, sprint planning inputs, tradeoff decisions, UAT planning, readiness checkpoints, and release prioritization across agile delivery teams.

- Partner with Scrum Masters, Technology leads, UX/UI, QA, Architecture, Operations, and control partners to remove blockers and provide delivery teams with clear, actionable requirements.

- Drive delivery predictability through measurable objectives, capacity alignment, dependency tracking, decision transparency, and proactive risk management.

Product Ownership

- Own the strategy, roadmap, governance, and delivery of transaction banking capabilities across payments, entitlements, security administration, and servicing, including workflows, user access management and administration, operational processes, and business rules that support secure, scalable, auditable, and client-centric digital experiences.

- Partner with Core Product, Operations, Technology, Risk, Compliance, Legal, Information Security, and Servicing teams to ensure capabilities meet client, operational, regulatory, resiliency, and control requirements.

- Drive secure, scalable, measurable, and supportable platform capabilities by incorporating operational procedures, risk controls, audit requirements, and production support considerations into product design.

- Define and monitor key performance metrics across client adoption, digital engagement, payment activity, entitlement administration, servicing efficiency, operational impact, and risk reduction.

- Leverage data, analytics, and client feedback to drive continuous improvement, inform roadmap decisions, optimize platform performance, and support future capabilities such as AI-enabled servicing, proactive exception management, and reusable digital services.

Stakeholder Partnership and Leadership

- Build alignment across regional and functional stakeholders while maintaining a clear product vision, prioritized roadmap, and delivery plan.

- Lead and mentor Business Analysts, and delivery team members on requirements quality, stakeholder engagement, backlog management, story writing, readiness routines, and release execution.

- Communicate delivery status, decisions, risks, dependencies, tradeoffs, and recommendations in a clear, concise, and executive-ready manner.

Foster a product-led culture focused on client value, accountability, continuous improvement, control discipline, and delivery excellence

Qualifications and Skills

Qualifications and Skills

- 10+ years of experience in product management, product ownership, digital banking, treasury services, transaction banking, payments, cash management, or closely related financial services roles.

- Strong understanding of agile delivery practices, including backlog ownership, product discovery, user story writing, acceptance criteria, prioritization, sprint planning, refinement, UAT, release readiness, and post-release validation.

- Experience delivering digital channel capabilities such as client portals, APIs, host-to-host integrations, onboarding, servicing workflows, reporting, alerts, approvals, or self-service tools.

- Knowledge of payments, payment operations, approval workflows, account services, client servicing, risk controls, regulatory considerations, and operational procedures in a banking environment.

- Experience with entitlement models, user administration, role-based access, security administration, audit controls, client hierarchy, or shared access requirements.

- Ability to work across Technology, Operations, Risk, Compliance, Legal, Sales, Servicing, UX/UI, Architecture, Data and Analytics, and regional teams to align priorities and deliver practical outcomes.

- Strong executive communication, stakeholder management, analytical, decision-making, and influencing skills, with the ability to translate complex product and control topics into clear business decisions.

- Strong business acumen with the ability to connect product priorities to client experience, growth, operating efficiency, risk reduction, platform scalability, and measurable value.

Recommended years of experience: 10

Additional Requirements

SMBC’s employees participate in a Hybrid workforce model that provides employees with an opportunity to work from home, as well as, from an SMBC office. SMBC requires that employees live within a reasonable commuting distance of their office location. Prospective candidates will learn more about their specific hybrid work schedule during their interview process. Hybrid work may not be permitted for certain roles, including, for example, certain FINRA-registered roles for which in-office attendance for the entire workweek is required.

SMBC provides reasonable accommodations during candidacy for applicants with disabilities consistent with applicable federal, state, and local law. If you need a reasonable accommodation during the application process, please let us know at [email protected].