Senior Legal Counsel - Fintech Partnerships and New Products
Role Description:
Established in 1996 in Amsterdam, Booking.com has grown from a small Dutch start-up to the third largest e-commerce company in the world. Booking.com is the largest business within Booking Holdings (NASDAQ: BKNG) and accounts for the vast majority of Booking Holdings’ total revenue.Booking Holdings is a leading Fortune 500 e-commerce conglomerate with a market cap of approximately $80 billion.
With a mission to make it easier for everyone to experience the world, Booking.com invests in digital technology that helps take the friction out of travel. Booking.com connects travellers with the world’s largest selection of incredible places to stay, including everything from apartments, vacation homes, and family-run B&Bs to 5-star luxury resorts and even tree houses.
With a cross-functional team based in Amsterdam and across the world, and plans to expand our FinTech capabilities throughout 2024, we are looking for a technically savvy, adaptable and versatile lawyer to help us develop new FinTech product innovations and support the Fintech Business Unit’s strategic ambitions.
Booking.com is currently looking for a Senior Legal Counsel - Fintech Partnerships and New Products to join our Product & Fintech Legal Team.
As Legal Counsel, the successful candidate will support the negotiation and drafting of critical third party payment service provider contracts, as well as contribute to the commercial strategy that supports the Fintech ambitions and also facilitates and enables broader goals, across a spectrum of travel-related services, triggering regulatory implications including Payment Services Directive in the EU, FX, scheme rules and other equivalent global payment and financial services regulations.
Fintech is a key component of Booking.com’s long-term and short-term high-impact strategy, to create a global travel experience marketplace, enabling more dynamic choices for travellers furthering the company priorities.
As Senior Legal Counsel - Fintech Partnerships and New Products, your responsibilities will be:
- Supporting the negotiation and drafting of critical third party payment service provider contracts, ensuring compliance with laws, regulations and card scheme requirements and optimising for commercial outcomes whilst protecting the company from foreseeable risks and consequences.
- Procuring and interpreting legal advice to the Fintech business including on payment regulatory strategy, new fintech products and partnership models), from external counsel and internal subject matter experts
- Coordinating legal support across different specialisms and areas (including Consumer, Regulatory DMA/DSA, Data Protection, Compliance)
- Analysing precedents/case law and proposed existing laws and regulations that may impact the new Fintech products and their growth and facilitate the implementation of any regulatory requirements
- Liaise with Fintech Partnerships and New Fintech Product owners to support queries and help coordinate requests for input and legal advice for their various initiatives that are generated by our internal risk assessment processes
- Carrying out other tasks as required to enhance the effectiveness of the Product & Fintech legal team
The ideal candidate will have:
- Knowledge of and demonstrable experience of compliance with regulations, ideally, Payments and Fintech, although Financial Services, or Privacy, or other rapidly evolving and developing regulatory contexts can assist
- Innovative: the ability to meet complex challenges with innovative solutions that will apply successfully across multiple practice areas and jurisdictions
- Ability to empathise with the regulatory expectations of regulators, review output and communicate with fluidity and precision in dealings with regulators
- Curiosity about and interest in exploring legal technologies and tech-enabled efficiencies; experience with multiple legal tech solutions is a plus
- Expertise in data presentation in regulatory contexts
- Very strong organizational and project management skills. Capable of handling multiple projects/initiatives simultaneously and executing to completion
- A natural problem-solver and strategic thinker, comfortable with ambiguity and able to bring structure to challenging situations
- Someone who is always looking for opportunities to drive efficiency through appropriate use of the right technologies
- Strong communication skills, particularly clear and concise written communication
- A natural at building consensus and working with multiple stakeholders to drive projects to completion
Further skills we are looking for:
- Aligning with Booking.com’s Values (Think Customer First, Succeed Together, Own It, Learn Forever, Do the Right Thing)
- Being curious, flexible, and a creative and pragmatic problem solver
- Confident yet collaborative
- Ability to influence stakeholders across all levels within the organisation
- Being proactive, resilient and having the drive to get things done
- Having sound judgement and the ability to see the big picture and simultaneously appreciate the details necessary to operationalise the strategy
- Having the courage to take positions and make tough judgment calls
- Being a team player, self aware and a good listener - a diverse group will always find the best solution!
- Ability to move with agility, prioritise workloads and meet deadlines
- Forward thinking with an interest in emerging issues in legal and policy
Booking.com ensures equal employment opportunity to all employees and applicants. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, colour, family or medical care leave, gender, gender identity, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex, pregnancy and childbirth, sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws and regulations.
We aspire to have a workplace that reflects all of the diverse communities we serve and we welcome and encourage candidates from all backgrounds and experiences to apply for roles on our team. We work to cultivate an inclusive culture in which all of our employees can be their authentic selves.
Why join the Legal & Public Affairs Team now?
Booking.com’s Legal & Public Affairs team is on a transformational journey at an exciting time for e-commerce and travel, with constant growth and innovation in how we operate. You will have the opportunity to actively shape the Department’s future.The Legal & Public Affairs team is a critical part of realising Booking.com’s strategy of the Connected Trip (a travel experience that includes not just accommodation, but also transportation, attractions, experiences, payments, flights etc).
This is a journey that requires close business and Legal & Public Affairs partnerships to redefine our business model, navigate complex regulatory environments, build new products, and negotiate increasingly elaborate commercial deals, among other important projects our teams work on every day.To tackle this mission, it all starts with a strong team passionate about growing Booking.com in an ethical and sustainable way!
Who we are:
To match our global footprint and the array of challenges we face, we are proud to highlight the diversity that exists across this group. We are a team of approximately 165 professionals - representing more than 35 nationalities - with lawyers qualified in many different countries, as well as non-lawyers with public policy, economics, compliance and risk backgrounds.Our team’s previous experience spans across a multitude of industries with team members having worked for major global companies (including Amazon, American Express, Google, Nokia and Yum! Brands), tech and other startups (e.g. AirBnB, Uber and WeWork), government entities (e.g., the Dutch Competition Authority), reputable international law firms (e.g., Hogan Lovells, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Baker Mckenzie), and Public Affairs firms (e.g., FTI Consulting, FIPRA and Brunswick).
In addition to our day-to-day work, we actively seek opportunities for our team members to engage in broader global legal and public affairs communities through speaking engagements, training programs, and association memberships. Some of our lawyers are Board members of Consumer Law associations, Competition Law associations, Privacy associations, etc.We believe in actively engaging with stakeholders to share our insights on policies affecting the travel experience and how travel tech innovations can fuel the digital transformation of the travel industry (e.g. we recently launched Booking.com’s Public Affairs blog, where we publish our position on key policy issues - A World Worth Experiencing).
As a team, we believe in:
- - Integrating with the Business and Legal having a “seat at the table”: we are decision makers who can have a real impact on Booking.com’s future
- Booking.com’s mission is to make it easier for everyone to experience the world. Travel helps people become more open minded and fuels curiosity
- Allowing members of our teams to experience different areas of the business or, if they want to be specialists, giving them the tools that will empower them to become more effective in their jobs
- Providing holistic legal and public affairs advice; our team should not work in silos
- Always looking for better ways of doing things, innovating and exchanging best practices
- Accepting that it's OK to make mistakes provided we learn from them
- Having a sense of humour and having fun working together; we are a team that likes to collaborate and share in joys and challenges together!