Credit Risk Manager/Director

Credit Risk Manager/Director @ Nelo

About Nelo

Nelo is a leading consumer fintech and e-commerce platform in Mexico, with >$500MM in annualized GMV and >$70MM in annualized revenue. Our mission is to increase the buying power of consumers in Latin America, and we are doing so by building a modern alternative to credit cards.
Nelo has raised over $40M of venture capital from investors including Homebrew, Two Sigma Ventures and Susa Ventures. Nelo has additionally raised a $100M asset credit facility from Victory Park Capital.
Our lean team includes experienced leaders from top technology companies including Uber, Amazon, Rappi, and DiDi. We pride ourselves on our velocity, intellectual rigor, and efficiency.
Nelo has offices in Mexico City and New York City.

Location: NYC or Mexico City, 80% in office

Language: English required, Spanish nice to have

Role mission: To maximize gross profit and portfolio resiliency by iteratively testing approve/decline, line assignment, and loan pricing & duration policies.

Role outcomes

What must get done; the reasons we opened this role.

1. Resilient portfolio: Within one month of start date, model a course to a portfolio that can sustain a 100% increase in losses without causing gross margin to dip below a specified range.

2. Consistent acquisition cohorts: By the end of the third month post start date, there should be no stable segments with a >=15% (relative) difference between expected vs actual credit loss performance at time of acquisition (because you’ve targeted any that appear with short-term rule adjustments).

3. Early momentum: 1pp gain in gross profit. During your time spent accomplishing the outcomes above, proactively identify opportunities to improve approve/decline, line assignment, pricing, or loan duration policy. Launch an experiment to test your hypotheses within three months of start date. Within four months of starting at Nelo, we should see at least one experiment generating a 1pp increase in gross profit in the treatment group.

4. Steady state gross profit generation: Within a year of starting, generate a cumulative $1mm of gross profit that would not have existed had you not run the experiments and made the credit policy changes that you did. Within two years, this number should be $5mm cumulative.

YoE and role scope note: There is no general years of experience requirement. However, in order to possess the competencies below and to work within the posted comp range, we’d expect successful candidates to have around 6-12 total years of experience. Also, this is a senior IC role. Scale your impact through code and agents first; people leadership opportunities will be unlocked for high performers when there are specific outcomes that are clearly best achieved by hiring people. In a business growing like ours, your ability to push yourself and be effective will be your biggest constraint on impact, not resources.

Role-specific competencies

The skills you will need to accomplish the role outcomes

• Background: Must have at least one year of experience in either (1) non-prime consumer lending or (2) LATAM-based consumer lending. The more the better, and of course having both would give you a strong advantage.

• Analytical self-sufficiency. Your analysis should not need to be double-checked for technical correctness. Your SQL proficiency is advanced.

• Autonomy: After becoming familiar with our product and customer base, you have strong opinions about what should be improved, and you autonomously act to achieve those improvements.

• Openness to criticism: You should be comfortable with your leaders and other stakeholders telling you that you are wrong, or at a minimum, questioning whether you are right. This is just part of the job in risk.

• Persuasion: The flip side of being open to criticism, is that you’ll also need the ability to persuade team members to accept or do things that they don’t like but that are essential to the company’s health.

• Paranoia: You are legitimately concerned about losses or profit moving in the wrong direction, you worry a lot about how we might lose money, you are not satisfied with the first explanation, you dig deeper, etc.

• Communication and executive presence: A critical aspect of risk is expectation management; We need to know that you will present yourself with poise in front of leaders and other stakeholders. Your communication style should at least not be confusing.

Company culture fit competencies

What makes people successful at Nelo

• Ambitious: You are highly driven to succeed, you are competitive, and perpetually unsatisfied.

• High standards: This is your craft and you sweat the details.

• Work ethic: Nelo isn’t a large established company where the machine is already fully optimized; we are, for example, discovering the correct credit box as we go. This simply requires a lot of work, and if that’s unpalatable to you, that’s ok but this role isn’t for you.

• Proactivity: At Nelo, people that act with ownership and agency are rewarded with more responsibility and compensation.

• Efficiency: We prefer to move fast and learn fast, which requires efficiency.

• Honesty and integrity: We are dealing with people’s financial lives. We have to be able to trust you.

Why I joined Nelo

A personal note from the hiring manager

For some background, Nelo is building a modern alternative to a credit card, designed from first principles for a world of real-time and mobile payments. Our mission is to increase the buying power of consumers in Latin America.

I joined this company for two reasons:

1. The founders: Kyle and Stephen are world class operators that brought the experimentation culture from Uber and applied it to a lending business in Mexico. The result after years of compounding is incredible; it must be near the top of its vintage (2019) for lending fintechs. The founders are kind, honest, hard-driving, paranoid (about risk!), pragmatic, intelligent, very hard working, and never satisfied.

2. Unit economic and product-market fit: You cannot reach a ~$70mm annualized revenue run rate, and be profitable on a net basis without the unit economics being solid, and without customers actually liking the product.

Nelo has also raised from some of the best investors, including Homebrew and Two Sigma Ventures. We also have all the debt capital we need, and from reputable lenders. We have an ambitious, senior, and technical team with a performance culture. This isn’t financial advice, but I’ll be honest, I’m excited about the value of my equity. Come build with the team and I!

Compensation and Benefits

• Base salary: NYC: $175-225K, CDMX: COL-adjusted

• Competitive equity

• 100% medical, dental & vision insurance coverage for you, 50% for dependents

• 401(k) for US-based employees

• Extended maternity and paternity leave

• Unlimited PTO (though most of us take about 3-4 weeks/yr)

• Relocation support