Head of Credit Risk and Underwriting

About the Job

As we expand our Cards Acquiring business through both direct acquiring and through partner banks, managing credit risk of the merchants and dealing with Cards related fraud and attacks is becoming a major area of focus for us. We are looking for a seasoned risk professional to join us as the Head of Credit Risk & Underwriting to own and manage all aspects of merchant risk related to Cards Acquiring. This will include credit risk assessment of larger merchants at onboarding and over their lifecycle through underwriting, setting and adjusting transaction limits and reserves, investigating cards related alerts generated by merchant monitoring, managing disputes and chargebacks, and developing standard operating procedures and credit risk dashboards.

You will lead a team of operations analysts to accomplish the above tasks and will identify and recruit new members as needed. You will be responsible for training and upskilling the existing team and guiding other Risk teams in writing policies, designing monitoring rules and procuring the required data and technology to assist with cards risk management. You will also be responsible for interacting with the merchants, partner banks and various internal stakeholders such as Product, Sales, Legal and Compliance.

The role requires strong understanding of credit risk fundamentals, cards payments, merchant investigations and underwriting. You will need to be able to conduct hands-on financial analysis and credit risk assessment and train other team members too. You will require strong investigation skills and communication skills to deal with various stakeholders in multiple countries with varied interests and concerns.

This is a high visibility role which will require coordination with teams within Risk and across Xendit and managing senior stakeholders in country offices. You will need to educate the stakeholders on risk matters, partner with them on solutions and act as a consultant for business decisions. You will be a key member of the Risk leadership team with critical responsibilities, working in a fast-paced environment, and you will see tangible results of your efforts.

Minimum Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in business underwriting, credit-risk management, or risk operations
• Solid understanding of risk concepts and demonstrated experience in investigations
• Experience with managing cards exposure and setting limits and reserves
• Excellent communication and ability to set up new processes and manage stakeholders
• Experience managing a team, preferably distributed across multiple regions

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience managing chargebacks and disputes
• Ability to train and upskill operational teams and building teams from scratch 
• Experience working in an unstructured environment with uneven data availability and reliability

Responsibilities

• Credit risk assessment of high exposure Cards merchants at onboarding and post-onboarding
• Assign and adjust transaction limits, reserves and other controls, as needed
• Track and manage the exposure and credit-risk across the Cards Acquiring portfolio
• Investigate cards related alerts generated by merchant monitoring
• Manage chargeback related processes across the operating countries
• Assist Sales, Product and other teams in communicating with merchants regarding reserves and limits policies and address merchant queries and appeals
• Be the subject matter expert for everything related to credit risk, reserves, underwriting for Cards
• Partner with other Risk teams to optimize rules performance
• Track and report key performance indicators for Cards risk management
• Do whatever it takes to make Xendit successful