Senior Director of Underwriting, Fraud Monitoring & Boarding

Accountabilities:

• • 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.

  Requirements:

  • 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, operational tradeoffs, and exceptions to senior stakeholders.
  • Strong cross-functional leadership skills and the ability to influence Product, Engineering, Compliance, Finance, Sales, Legal, and external banking partners.
  • Preferred experience in small-business lending, working capital, MCA, factoring, term lending, embedded finance, or related credit products.
  • Experience launching or scaling lending, credit, or embedded-finance products within payments, fintech, B2B software, or vertical SaaS environments is a plus.
  • Familiarity with AI/ML risk decisioning platforms and LLM-based document-review technologies is advantageous.
  • Exposure to model risk management frameworks such as SR 11-7 or equivalent, sponsor-bank audits, regulatory examinations, and multi-jurisdictional U.S./Canadian requirements is preferred.
  • Understanding of lending economics, including credit facilities, covenants, advance rates, cost of capital, underwriting policy, and pricing considerations, is beneficial.

  Benefits:

  • Annual base salary: $140,000–$160,000.
  • Remote work opportunity.
  • Opportunity to lead and transform critical underwriting, fraud, and merchant-risk functions within a scaling B2B payments environment.
  • High visibility and close collaboration with senior leaders across Product, Engineering, Compliance, Finance, and banking partnerships.
  • Opportunity to shape AI-enabled risk operations and future embedded lending capabilities.
  • Opportunity to build and scale high-performing teams and modern operating models.
  • Exposure to sophisticated payments, accounts receivable, fraud, underwriting, and lending data.
  • Equal opportunity workplace committed to diversity and inclusion.