Senior Director of Underwriting

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Senior Director of Underwriting, Fraud Monitoring & Boarding based in the United States.

• Lead and scale teams across merchant underwriting, boarding operations, risk analytics, fraud monitoring, and portfolio risk, establishing clear performance expectations, coaching, and development plans.
• Own day-to-day merchant boarding and underwriting operations across payments and future lending applications, ensuring efficient, consistent, and controlled execution.
• Redesign onboarding and underwriting workflows around intelligent automation and AI-assisted decisioning, enabling straight-through processing for low-risk applications while routing complex cases to appropriate human reviewers.
• Define and operationalize risk appetite, credit policies, exposure limits, approval authorities, escalation thresholds, and exception-management processes across merchant segments.
• Establish effective risk governance routines, including delegated authority workflows, exception reviews, quality controls, and recurring reporting for senior leadership and sponsor bank stakeholders.
• Partner with Product, Engineering, Compliance, Finance, and external vendors to modernize KYB/KYC, beneficial ownership, sanctions screening, fraud detection, bank-data connectivity, transaction monitoring, and decision orchestration capabilities.
• Implement automated document-review and decision-support capabilities while ensuring automated outputs remain explainable, auditable, reviewable, and subject to appropriate human oversight.
• Contribute to the design of future embedded lending operations, including application intake, underwriting policies, documentation requirements, exposure and line-assignment inputs, exception handling, servicing controls, and loss mitigation.
• Partner with Finance and senior leadership on portfolio performance, loss forecasting, vintage analysis, reserve modeling, pricing inputs, and the economics of future lending products.
• Own ongoing merchant risk monitoring, including transaction surveillance, chargebacks, returns, ACH trends, behavioral anomalies, fraud indicators, and early signs of credit deterioration.
• Develop executive and sponsor-bank dashboards covering merchant exposure, fraud, losses, exceptions, chargebacks, returns, and other critical risk indicators.
• Establish and lead response protocols for significant events such as fraud rings, processor issues, funding disputes, NSF activity, and breaches of merchant agreements.
• Maintain compliance with applicable NACHA, BSA/AML, OFAC, card-network, state lending, and sponsor-bank requirements across U.S. and Canadian operations.
• Serve as a key operational contact for sponsor banks and processors during audits, file reviews, exception requests, policy discussions, and regulatory or compliance activities.
• Translate risk strategy into measurable KPIs and SLAs, including time-to-decision, approval rates, fraud basis points, loss rates, processing efficiency, and merchant experience.
• Use SQL, portfolio analytics, alternative data, and performance metrics to identify opportunities for better risk segmentation, faster decisions, and improved underwriting quality.

• 8+ years of relevant experience in payments risk, merchant underwriting, boarding operations, credit risk, financial services operations, or a closely related field, including at least 3+ years leading teams or significant operational workstreams.
• Deep expertise in merchant underwriting, including KYB/KYC, beneficial ownership, financial statement analysis, exposure modeling, MCC and industry risk, and chargeback economics.
• Demonstrated success modernizing legacy onboarding or underwriting environments through automated decisioning, vendor integrations, workflow orchestration, and straight-through processing.
• Hands-on familiarity with modern KYB/KYC, fraud, bank-data aggregation, accounting-data, and decision-orchestration technologies.
• Working knowledge of card-network rules, NACHA, BSA/AML, OFAC, and sponsor-bank operating requirements, with experience working within processor and banking environments.
• Strong analytical capabilities, including fluency in SQL and the ability to investigate portfolio data, evaluate model outputs, and challenge analytical conclusions constructively.
• Ability to identify and apply alternative data signals, including accounts receivable, invoice, accounting-system, payer-behavior, and transaction data, to improve underwriting and risk monitoring.
• Practical understanding of AI and automation, with the ability to identify high-value use cases while maintaining appropriate controls, auditability, transparency, and human oversight.
• Excellent communication and executive presence, with the ability to clearly explain underwriting decisions, risk trends, and operational trade-offs to internal and external stakeholders.