Lead Risk Manager

About the role

The ideal candidate for this role will be a highly skilled and strategic individual who can oversee the credit lifecycle, develop analytics and strategies for optimizing recovery rates, and effectively manage a team. They will combine deep analytical capabilities with a strong understanding of ECL (Expected Credit Loss) modeling, cohort analysis, and risk operations. The role requires a balance of high-level strategic thinking and the ability to dive deep into the math and execution of data-driven decisions. The person must have experience managing people and optimizing the credit processes, while ensuring effective communication across various departments (e.g., call centers, underwriting, collections). This individual must think like a systems engineer to isolate variables impacting recovery performance and create actionable solutions.

Key Responsibilities :

• Analytics and Strategy Development : Lead the analytics and strategy for optimizing credit processes across the unsecured lending portfolio; develop, maintain, and refine ECL models to predict and optimize recovery rates; use cohort analysis and book analysis to assess performance, measure recovery effectiveness, and adjust strategy based on trends; drive A / B testing and test-learn-iterate approaches to improve credit strategies for both short-term recovery and long-term customer relationships; understand how different data dimensions affect each other and synthesize findings into actionable insights.
• Modeling & Data Analytics : Perform data extraction and analysis (SQL, Python, or other analytics tools) to monitor credit performance; build models to isolate recovery rates impacted by underwriting decisions vs. credit efforts; conduct analyses to understand portfolio behavior and segment customers by recovery likelihood; evaluate the relationship between underwriting decisions and recovery performance to identify improvements in both functions.
• Team Management & Optimization : Manage a cross-functional team of analysts and credit specialists; provide tools, training, and support to optimize performance; refine recovery rates across segments and ensure alignment between underwriting, credit, and customer service; collaborate with call center teams on call tonality and strategy; develop and track key performance metrics and drive initiatives to improve efficiency.
• Strategic Oversight & Process Improvement : Align credit strategy with profitability, risk management, and customer experience; manage the entire credit lifecycle from outreach to final resolution while balancing risk and satisfaction; implement innovative strategies to improve recovery rates considering segmentation and call center approaches.
• Collaboration & Stakeholder Communication : Work with underwriting, data science, marketing, and senior leadership to refine credit strategy; communicate insights and recommendations to senior leadership and advocate for a test-learn-iterate mindset to drive data-informed decisions.

Requirements

Benefits

Additional information

Location : Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa

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