Maal Scheme Specialist

About the role

The Central Bank of Oman is recruiting a Maal Scheme Specialist to lead the strategy and development of Maal, the domestic card scheme, and to support its adoption and compliance. The role involves monitoring banks' performance, ensuring adherence to scheme rules and CBO directives, and coordinating initiatives to increase card issuance and usage across Oman.

Key responsibilities

• Support the development and implementation of the Maal product strategy and roadmap.
• Conduct market research and assess market needs to identify opportunities for product innovation and scheme development.
• Support the introduction of new Maal products and services.
• Develop and recommend pricing models, incentives and promotional strategies to increase adoption and usage.
• Help develop the required Maal scheme rules and ensure compliance with applicable standards.
• Collaborate with issuers and monitor banks' implementation of Maal requirements, identify compliance gaps and follow up on corrective actions.
• Coordinate marketing campaigns, merchant promotions and awareness initiatives to encourage Maal usage.
• Analyse scheme performance against KPIs and recommend improvements.
• Deliver clear, accurate and timely reports to senior management.

Required profile

• Bachelor's degree in Banking, Finance, Business Administration, Information Systems or a related field.
• Minimum 7 years of experience in card schemes, banks or payment service providers managing card products.
• Proven experience in launching card scheme products; direct involvement in domestic or regional card schemes is highly preferred.
• Prior experience with domestic card scheme implementation.

Required skills

• Understanding of Oman's card payment system infrastructure and ecosystem.
• EMV expertise (contact/contactless specifications).
• Mobile and digital payment knowledge (tokenization, mobile wallets, NFC, QR-based payments).
• Payment systems operations (switching, clearing, settlement, including OmanNet) and payment standards (EMV, PCI DSS, ISO 8583, ISO 20022).
• Fraud risk management, business continuity planning, project management (PMP preferred), systems testing and business systems understanding.

Applications are open until 15 November 2026.