Head of Risk

FairMoney is a credit-led mobile bank for emerging markets. The company was launched in 2017, operates in Nigeria & Zambia & Uganda, and raised close to €50m from global investors like Tiger Global, DST & Flourish Ventures.
You will be working as a Global head of Risk in our Risk division, which is now composed of 10+ people in Lagos, Bangalore, South Africa, Latvia, and remotely across the globe.
Watch the way FairMoney is building Africa's money story here

About the Role

You will be working as FairMoney’s Head of Risk, managing the Risk department and being critically responsible for FairMoney’s overall success.

Your mission is to ensure portfolio performance according to the company's OKRs, and risk appetite, and offer the best-tailored credit services across our multiple value propositions.

Your goal is to successfully execute Fairmoney strategies, achieving optimal profitability and creating sustainable access to credit for all.

This is a critical role, highly visible with significant exposure to business leaders and the leadership team. All FairMoney strategies and execution thereof interact with and are influenced by the Risk team's strategies, rules, and decisions. FairMoney ultimately succeeds by what you and your team deliver. Your role is to lead FairMoney in delivering value, achieving targets, and delivering risk-adjusted returns.

Roles and Responsibilities

• Define risk appetite for the company that is approved by Senior Leadership and the board.
• Manage the business within risk appetite.
• Using analytics, test and learn strategies, set and execute all risk strategies that enable achievement of company OKRs.
• Own the main portfolio metrics - default rates, acceptance rates, collection rates, retention rates, and profitability.
• Forecast, monitor, and deliver insights on portfolio performance and ECL / impairment results and trends.
• Drive the decision of new risk product updates in terms of product offerings and underwriting funnel improvements.
• Lead the company in understanding NPV and unit-level economics. Deliver strategies that optimize trade-offs and deliver business success and optimize lifetime value.
• Design and execute collections strategy.
• Lead the company in its fraud prevention workstreams both from the product setup and underwriting policy perspective fully defining fraud strategies and risk appetite.
• Own and drive the risk-related product roadmap with tech and product teams working closely together with the Product and Engineering team on improvements for the lending product, data, and risk strategies.
• Build, improve, and maintain risk policies.
• Chair the credit committee reporting back to stakeholders, the senior leadership team, and the Board.
• Stay up to date on regulatory changes and rules. Ensure compliance. Where applicable support audits and influence regulation changes.
• Work closely with the Data Science team and their priorities ensuring world-class tools are used and decisions are always optimal.
• Mentoring and coaching talented FairtToopers, scaling up the team as and when required.

Experience

• Overall 10 to 15 years of credit risk experience with exposure to Fintech / retail banking credit risk (consumer loans) / NBFCs. Preference for prior CRO / Head of Risk experience. Leadership of multiple products or geographies
• History of managing companies through growth and recessionary periods.
• Experience developing a vision and then instituting a data-driven, analytically rigorous framework and infrastructure to support credit decisions in payment products.
• Experience in analytical skills like data science model development, NPV modeling, impairment forecasting, and setting up different A/B tests and building sensitivity analysis.
• Proficient SQL user, with reasonable experience with BI tools like Tableau, Power BI, or similar.
• years in credit risk management, including leadership of multiple products or geographies.
• End-to-end lifecycle expertise + strategic planning capability.

Ownership of OKRs:

• Full P&L-linked OKRs (GP, ECL, approval rates, churn, retention, debt sales, etc).
• Risk appetite definition and governance sign-off authority.

Previous Work:

• Built or transformed a risk function in a high-growth lending environment.
• Implemented scorecard strategies, collections segmentation, and product-specific risk frameworks.

Team Size Experience:

• Managed 5–15+ people including managers and analysts.
• Led distributed or multi-country teams.

Growth Experience:

• Successfully launched new products, new markets, or major portfolio restructuring while keeping losses in check.

• Training & Development
• Family Leave (Maternity, Paternity)
• Paid Time Off (Vacation, Sick & Public Holidays)
• Remote Work
  

Recruitment Process

• A screening interview with one of the members of the Talent Acquisition team for 30 minutes.
• Takeaway assignment to be done at home.
• Technical interview for 60-90 minutes with the Hiring Manager.
• Interview/Presentation to the key stakeholders for 60-90 minutes.