Job Description

The Credit Policy Lead reports to the Head of Banking Product and Operations and defines Square Banking’s credit policy and owns the health of our portfolio.

Square Banking provides loans, merchant cash advances, credit cards, lines of credit, hardware installment plans and other financing products to Square merchants around the world. For ten years, we have led the way in using data to extend capital to the businesses we serve. We nurture credit products from ideation to global scale with an unwavering sense of ownership. We pride ourselves on our integrity, innovation, attention to detail and empathy for business operators of all sizes.

You will:

• Set our overall risk appetite, the direction of our lending activity, and create a sound, profitable global credit portfolio.
• Advise the Product Development team on credit strategies, providing inputs to the development of credit product economics, and recommending appropriate product guardrails. With a special emphasis on new and early-stage product development, you will advise on key experiments designed to validate credit assumptions, and help build an appropriate risk tolerance tailored to the product’s maturity.
• Manage and improve our credit framework, including underwriting and decisioning strategies, line monitoring management policies, forbearance and relief policies, and collection policies.
• Design and guide the implementation of underwriting approaches and supporting models, in partnership with Data Science teams and our partner banks, and work with credit reference agencies to determine the correct inputs to policy and to furnish information on borrowers.
• Run your own analyses to inform credit policy changes and test their impact. You will be supported in this by Credit Policy Analysts from our Data Science team, but should also expect to self-serve data you need to guide decisions.
• Own and monitor the ongoing quality of the portfolio, working with Data Science teams, by compiling and analyzing credit risk indicators, segmenting the portfolio appropriately; identifying, reporting and baselining against macroeconomic trends; identifying policy modifications to improve portfolio performance; monitor the effectiveness of underwriting heuristics.
• Enhance our credit reporting framework to improve granular understanding of portfolio performance and enable better decisions.
• Prepare and present regular lending activity and portfolio health reports with relevant metrics such as Key Risk Indicators (KRIs) and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for the Square Banking leadership team, various Boards of Directors, internal and external auditors and regulators.
• Work with Engineering, Data Science, Accounting and Internal Audit teams to remediate deficiencies in our credit framework.
• Implement training programs with the Credit Operations team on all aspects of the Credit Framework, ensure that lending activities comply with internal policies and regulatory requirements.
• Partner with the Square Payments Risk team to integrate the credit framework into Square’s overall merchant risk framework.
• Evaluate individual deal opportunities to structure credit for large businesses onboarding to Square.

Qualifications

• A Bachelor’s degree in technical or business related fields such as Mathematics, Financial Engineering, Computer Science, Statistics, Data Science, Economics, Finance, Business Administration at minimum
• 12+ years of progressively responsible credit risk experience within financial institutions, and expertise in underwriting or portfolio management
• A proven track record of managing consumer of SME lending throughout the credit cycle, including significant experience of credit card products and unsecured loans
• A strong understanding of credit policy frameworks appropriate to various stages of product maturity, and an ability to balance speed to market with prudent risk management
• Experience with quantitative / statistical analysis, reporting tools such as SQL, Python, Excel etc
• Prior senior management / executive experience including experience presenting to Board of Directors and external regulators
• Excellent collaboration skills, comfort working in a highly matrixed environment, and a proven ability to influence others
• Excitement and capability to work in a versatile and nimble environment and learn new tools and technologies on the job
• The ability break down complex topics and results and communicate to all kinds of audiences
• Fintech experience and higher degrees are an advantage.
• Experience in advanced machine learning modeling methodologies is an advantage.