Independent talent for payments
Pre-vetted independent specialists in cards, acquiring, real-time payments, and scheme compliance. Each brings MBB, Big 4, or senior payments experience, ready to deploy on your product, transformation, and regulatory programmes.
Curated quality, deployed in days not months
Trusted by
Built for the realities of payments
Payments is moving on every front at once. Real-time rails, ISO 20022 migration, open banking, embedded finance, and relentless scheme and regulatory change. The skills that deliver this work are scarce, expensive to hire permanently, and rarely sitting idle. Outsized connects banks, processors, acquirers, card issuers, fintechs, and the consultancies that serve them with independent specialists who have built and run payments products themselves. People who understand Visa and Mastercard certification, PSD2 and PCI DSS, fraud and financial crime, and what it takes to migrate a live platform without breaking it.
The payments expertise clients ask us for most
Commercial & Portfolio
Portfolio P&L ownership, card lifecycle, B2B and commercial payments, and digital acquisition. Specialists who run the numbers rather than advise on them: reactivating dormant accounts, driving spend, and building always-on acquisition engines.
Product & Proposition
Cards, digital wallets, real-time payments, and embedded finance. Product leaders who have taken propositions from concept to live in regulated, multi-market environments, and who know what good looks like because they have shipped it.
Platforms & Technology
Processing platforms, payment gateways, CMS migrations, ISO 20022, tokenisation, cloud, and API-first integration. Architects who can connect legacy rails to modern real-time infrastructure, navigate scheme mandates, and keep production stable while they do it.
Delivery & Change
PMO leadership and multi-workstream delivery for platform migrations, scheme mandates, and transformation programmes. Structure without bureaucracy, change that sticks.
Risk, Compliance & Resilience
PSD2, PSD3, PCI DSS, AML, and scheme compliance, plus operational resilience under DORA, SAMA, CBUAE and beyond. Specialists who have built control frameworks at the coalface, under real regulatory scrutiny.
Fraud, Data & Financial Crime
Transaction monitoring, fraud analytics, and financial crime programmes, increasingly against AI-enabled fraud. People who can turn payments data into decisions and keep losses and false positives in check.
How payments organisations use Outsized
Every brief goes to practitioners who know your environment first-hand: the regulation, the delivery pressure, and what good looks like. No longlists, no sifting. You get two or three specialists you can hire with confidence.
Technology due diligence for a private equity acquisition in payments
Dunedin, a UK private equity fund, was evaluating a minority investment in a global payment processor whose proprietary card platform is certified by Visa and Mastercard. The investment thesis rested on the strength of that technology, and the deal team needed independent validation before entering exclusivity.
Challenge:
An indicative bid was already in. The due diligence had to be scoped, staffed, and ready to deploy the moment exclusivity was granted, and it needed real payments depth, not generic IT consultants who would miss scheme and certification risk.
Solution:
Outsized ran a structured sourcing and evaluation process, moving from brief to a shortlist of four specialist firms in days, each assessed against the demands of a payments technology due diligence. Alongside the shortlist, we shaped the diligence scope around Dunedin’s investment hypotheses: platform scalability, resilience, security, IT capex, and regulatory compliance.
Impact:
Dunedin had the scope and shortlist ready before exclusivity, compressing weeks of sourcing into days and letting the deal team move at the speed a competitive process demands, without adding risk to the timeline.
Having the scope and the shortlist ready before exclusivity meant we could move immediately. That time advantage matters in a competitive process.
– Deal team, Dunedin LLP
Built by ex-consultants and FS operators, for clients who expect more
Outsized brings a different approach to independent talent in payments. Founded by former management consultants and senior financial services operators, we understand what quality delivery looks like from both sides of the table. We are not a job board, and not a longlisting service. We are your curated talent partner, with every specialist vetted for payments context, plus access to 60,000 independent professionals globally.
Anurag Bhalla
CEO
With nearly two decades of experience in consulting and FS, expertise in digital transformation and innovation.
Experience from:
Sara Kahlau
APAC Lead & CPO
Sara leads the APAC regions and our product function. She has 15 years of experience from Consulting, Digital Transformation, and Innovation.
Experience from:
Azeem Zainulbhai
EMEA Co-Lead
Investment banking and private equity at Merrill Lynch and Bank of America, then CFO and Chief of Staff roles at fintech and marketplace scale-ups.
Experience from:
Build agile financial services teams powered by top independent talent
In financial services, agility, innovation, and compliance must go hand-in-hand. Outsized enables clients to scale delivery capacity through specialised independent professionals who understand FS environments – from transformation and risk to digital, data, product, and innovation.
Talent-on-Demand
Quickly close capability and capacity gaps for your core functions and project teams. Onboard talent in days, not weeks or months. Access our platform of top independent consultants, skilled contractors, and seasoned experts with deep execution experience.
Outsized Teams
Outsized Teams deliver complete project outcomes through agile, hand-picked teams of proven consultants and experts. Each team is built to your brief and mobilised fast – with lower overheads, transparent pricing, and hands-on management from your Outsized Capability Lead.
Bench by Outsized
Bench gives always-on access to curated and continuously updated and maintained talent pools of top-tier independents across high-priority skill areas. Outsized guarantees quality, depth and availability of talent, so you can immediately deploy skills as and when you need them.
Contract-to-Hire
Speed up and de-risk hiring for both you and the talent. With our Contract-to-Hire model, employers and talent get to know each other during a ‘try before you buy’ period – ensuring a great match for both sides. Escape lengthy, broken recruitment processes and confirm suitability through on-the-job performance.
Meet some of our payments specialists
Martin Wallraff
Payments & Transaction Banking Strategy
Two decades across global banking, payments, and fintech. A Roland Berger and Oliver Wyman alumnus advising on strategy, cost, and operating-model design across Europe, the Middle East, and South-East Asia.
Hardik Joshi
Commercial Cards Specialist
13 years in financial services across B2B sales, cards portfolio management, and digital wallet operations, with Mastercard scheme experience across MENA.
Cetrin Indah
Payments Product Manager
Product manager across the payments and technology industries, skilled in product development, business planning, and audit in regulated environments.
Read about our payments work
Technology due diligence for a PE acquisition in payments
How Outsized helped Dunedin scope and shortlist the right payments technology specialist inside a live deal window.
Accelerating payments product delivery with an acquiring squad
How Outsized teams helped a major Asian bank to scale their existing capabilities without any fixed costs.
Let’s talk about your payments talent needs
Outsized gives payments teams access to independent talent that is pre-vetted, fast to deploy, and experienced in real delivery. Whether you need a single specialist this week, a squad for a complex programme, or an always-on bench, we move quickly without compromising on quality. We do not send longlists. We send the right people. Tell us what you are working on and we will come back to you straight away.
Whether you need a single specialist this week, a team built for a complex programme, or an always-on talent bench, we move quickly without compromising on quality. We don’t send longlists. We send the right people.
Tell us what you’re working on and we’ll come back to you straight away.