Boarding & Underwriting Operations
• Lead a team of underwriters, risk analysts, and boarding specialists supporting both payments (PayFac/ISO) and lending applications.
• Redesign the boarding journey to be AI-first — straight-through approval for clean files, intelligent triage for exceptions, human review only where it adds judgment.
• Help define and operationalize risk appetite, credit policy, exposure limits, and approval guardrails across merchant segments, escalating exceptions through the appropriate leadership and governance forums.
• Support the operating rhythm for risk governance, including exception review, delegated authority workflows, escalation thresholds, and monthly reporting for senior leadership and sponsor bank partners.
Modern Decisioning Stack
• Partner with Product, Engineering, Compliance, and vendors to improve the technology stack for KYB/KYC, business verification, beneficial ownership, sanctions/PEP screening, fraud, bank/transaction data, and decision orchestration.
• Implement practical automation and AI-assisted document review for common underwriting materials, ensuring outputs are reviewable, auditable, and integrated into human decision workflows.
• Maintain clear controls around automated decisions, including decision logic documentation, override tracking, quality assurance, and periodic performance review.
Lending Underwriting
• Contribute to the buildout of the underwriting operating model for future embedded lending products, including application intake, policy translation, documentation requirements, line assignment inputs, and exception handling.
• Partner with Finance on portfolio performance, loss forecasting, vintage analysis, and reserve modeling.
• Partner with Finance and leadership to ensure underwriting practices, pricing inputs, and monitoring routines are aligned with the economics and risk profile of any future lending program.
• Establish servicing-side risk controls: early-warning triggers, collections strategy, and loss mitigation.
Portfolio Risk & Monitoring
• Own ongoing merchant monitoring, including transaction surveillance, chargeback and return analytics, behavioral anomaly detection, fraud indicators, ACH-return trends, and early signs of credit deterioration.
• Build dashboards and exposure reporting for executive and sponsor bank review.
• Lead reaction protocols for high-severity events (fraud rings, processor errors, funding disputes, NSFs, breaches of merchant agreement).
Compliance, Sponsor Bank & Network Relationships
• Ensure boarding and underwriting comply with NACHA, BSA/AML, OFAC, card brand rules, state lending laws, and sponsor bank requirements.
• Support consistent boarding, underwriting, and monitoring standards across U.S. and Canadian operations, partnering with Compliance on applicable jurisdictional requirements.
• Serve as a key operational contact with sponsor banks and processors on underwriting and risk matters, including audits, exception requests, file reviews, and policy alignment.
• Partner with Compliance and Legal on policy approvals, regulatory exam readiness, and audit response.
Leadership
• Build, coach, and scale a high-performing team across underwriting, boarding ops, risk analytics, and portfolio monitoring.
• Translate risk strategy into measurable SLAs and KPIs (time-to-decision, approval rate, fraud bps, loss rate, NPS for boarded merchants).