Senior Credit Risk Manager Full Time

iwoca Ltd

We’re here because we believe in small businesses. We believe they deserve better than waiting weeks for a loan. And we believe it’s our job to help them grow.

We started in 2012 with these principles, and we hold true to them today – now that we’re one of the fastest-growing fintechs in Europe. In the time between, we’ve built the best tech platform in lending, won several awards and opened up £3.5 billion in loans to over 90,000 businesses.

So what’s next? Our mission now is to help one million businesses who need us. To do this, we’ll need new products and partnerships. But most of all, we’ll need smart, hands-on people to join us on the journey and get us to our goal.

The role

We are looking for an experienced Senior Credit Risk Manager from a strong analytical background who can take potentially ambiguous business problems and formulate smart solutions that can be implemented in a pragmatic way.

Working closely with our Chief Credit Officer, Data Scientists and teams from across the business, you will ensure our scorecards, risk management frameworks and lending strategies are maximising value creation while keeping loss rates within expected bounds.

The range of projects will be broad, including driving improvements to our scorecards, optimising lending criteria, monitoring credit performance, developing risk management frameworks and providing credit risk expertise to support product development.

Your main focus will initially be on further optimisation of our enhanced lending strategy. This requires combining an understanding of the machine learning modelling process, the customer journey and iwoca’s technical infrastructure to drive effective compromises and decision making to optimise the end to end process.

The Credit Risk team:

Our primary focus is on managing the credit risk profile of our lending portfolios. This entails establishing and managing key strategies and frameworks required to enable the business to maximise value generation within our risk appetite. Activities within this wide ranging remit include:

• Partnering with finance on stress testing to define the businesses credit risk appetite with due consideration of the internal credit dynamics of our portfolio and macro external risk.
• Providing credit risk expertise to ensure funding sources are set up and to provide sufficient capacity, with the required flexibility and resilience at an appropriate cost.
• Establishing the policy and governance frameworks required to manage the risks, and maximise returns, within this appetite.
• Build and maintain the credit risk scorecards, and define the underwriting requirements, to optimise discrimination and value conversion in the credit assessment process.
• Playing a leading role in building and optimising our lending strategies to achieve our risk and economic targets.
• Ensuring lending strategies are supported by appropriate testing and monitoring activities.
• Setting the credit risk agenda aligned to the business strategy, ensuring buy-in from stakeholders and leadership.
• Proving credit risk expertise to multi-disciplinary projects with the wider team and business stakeholders.

• Strong analytical background: a degree in Mathematics, Physics, Engineering, or similar quantitative field; or equivalent experience.
• 4+ years experience in risk analytics and lending strategy optimisation at a traditional and/or Fintech lender.
• Passion for analytical problem-solving with a strong track record in both conceptual frameworks and technical execution. This will include the ability to personally conduct data driven analysis and guide this work through others.
• Experience using Python, Pandas, NumPy, SciPy, R, Matlab, and/or SQL – is a plus
• Excellent understanding of the statistical techniques and machine learning methodologies used in credit risk analysis and modelling. You don’t need to build the models, but collaborating with our exceptional Data Scientists, and guiding their work is a key part of this role.
• As a key interface between data scientists and various commercial and technical teams, excellent communication, influence and stakeholder management skills are essential.
• Strong commercial instincts, able to cut through complexity and ambiguity to make good business decisions in order to build innovative, but practical, solutions to business problems.
• Self-starter with the ability to work autonomously and bring structure to own and joint areas of work to rapidly drive results in a dynamic working environment.

Don’t take this list as prescriptive: it’s just to give you a sense of who might do well on the job. We’d still love to hear from you if you don’t hit every point on the list, or if you have other experience.

We want to pay all of our employees fairly, so that’s why we regularly benchmark salaries based on market rates and to recognise your increasing value to our business.

We are ideally looking to pay from £80,000 to £100,000 for this role, this isn’t fixed so let us know in your application what you are looking for. We know there may be some candidates who may not fit within this salary range, if this is the case we would still love to hear from you.

We work hard to make iwoca a place where everyone feels welcome – we want everyone to confidently be themselves. For us, diversity isn’t an optional add-on. It’s the thing that makes us great.

We put a lot of effort into making iwoca a brilliant place to work:

• Offices in London, Leeds, and Frankfurt
• Events and clubs, like bingo, comedy nights, yoga classes, football
• Two company retreats a year, we’ve been to France, Italy, Spain and further afield
• Plenty of drinks and snacks in our offices.

Our benefits package is second-to-none:

• Medical insurance from Vitality, including discounted gym membership
• 25 days’ holiday and an extra day off for your birthday
• Instant access to emotional and mental health support with our partner, Spill
• Generous maternity leave and shared parental leave
• A nursery tax benefit scheme to help you save money
• Paid volunteering time to support your chosen charity
• Extra leave if you want to travel or study
• One-month fully paid sabbatical after 4 years
• Cycle-to-work scheme and electric car scheme

And to make sure we all keep learning, we offer:

• An L&D budget for everyone, including a book budget
• Company-wide talks with internal and external speakers
• Access to learning platforms like Treehouse.