Head of Credit
£80,000 - £120,000 (dependant on experience) + Bonus + Benefits
Central London

Who They Are
They are a successful and fast expanding, FCA regulated specialist asset backed lender. There areas of business include providing bespoke short term loans secured against UK residential and commercial properties to enable purchase, refurbishment, development; asset finance lending and also invoice discount lending.

The Role
Reporting to the COO, you will help build first class processes and systems to ensure the company operates effectively and efficiently as a bank. You will be a member of Exco, the Management Risk Committee and Chair of Credit Committee. The role is a key succession role over the next five years and they are require a person with key leadership capabilities. You will be expected to create and develop a team from a mixture of backgrounds, both existing and new to the bank, in terms of culture, strategy and process. You will have the ability to work across organisations and be able to address issues in a proactive manner in developing solutions that are both practical and engaged with. It will be essential to think about the high level through to the granular detail of operation. The role is a "hands on" position within a small organisation and you must be able to think and plan while still delivering. The role will include:

Development of the portfolio management capability

  • Develop processes and analytics to assess and report credit exposures in a growing book across three asset lending areas
  • Work alongside the Asset & Liability Management (ALM) function to assess stress scenarios, with input at Exco level into the presentation of the scenarios, and input into the ILAA / ICAAP
  • Keep abreast of industry developments on portfolio management, bringing best practice to bear where relevant

Capital management

  • Work with the ALM function to understand the capital headroom available within the business, in order to make recommendations through underwriting into business development on the optimal origination of asset classes

Fraud analytics

  • Proactively identify and mitigate fraud risks facing the business through the credit risk process.
  • Work with legal counsel on any actions arising from fraud

Ownership of policy and process:

  • Ownership of credit, fraud and impairment policies
  • Identify, develop, implement and maintain the risk processes for these areas
  • Ensure that these policies tie in with adjacent processes across the business
  • Act as subject matter expert on these policies across the business

Reporting & MI

  • Oversee the impairment assessment process, through managing the impairment related policies and managing the collections function
  • Work with the Legal Counsel to ensure the appropriate exit points for appropriate impairment events
  • Work with Finance on the provisioning balances for Finance, including the assessment of the change in accounting standard as they progress towards IFRS9

Business wide leadership

  • Provide wider Credit subject matter expertise for change programmes and ad-hoc related projects
  • Work in co-operation with the wider leadership team to recommend and deliver improvements to the product offerings
  • Manage relationships with key service providers in line with business values

Who They Are Looking For
In order to be considered for this key role, you must meet the following criteria:

  • Deep experience of credit risk within a lending environment specifically with property lending experience (Knowledge of also of leasing and invoice discounting would be viewed favourably)
  • Knowledge and experience of portfolio management for credit risk
  • Senior management experience within a matrix structure, with demonstrable achievements in business improvement through advisory ability
  • Analytics experience for credit risk