Collections Operations Lead

Job description

### About Us Tamara is a leading fintech platform in Saudi Arabia and the GCC region with a mission to help people own their dreams built on being simple, trusted, and everywhere our customers need us. Today, more than 25 million customers and over 130,000 partner merchants depend on Tamara every day for reliable financial solutions across retail, travel, education, healthcare, and beyond. Tamara is backed by Sanabil Investments, a wholly owned company of the Public Investment Fund (PIF), and SNB Capital, among others. ### Your Role. The Collections Operations Lead – UAE Portfolio is responsible for end-to-end ownership of collections performance across assigned UAE portfolios. This role manages the external collection agencies reports and escalation, ensuring optimal recovery outcomes while maintaining regulatory compliance. The position holds full accountability for strategy execution, performance monitoring, quality control, and escalation management. This role owns overall delivery, productivity, and continuous improvement, working closely with cross-functional teams including Credit Risk, Policy, and Product to support data-driven decision-making and scalable collections operations. ### Your responsibilities: - Act as the primary point of contact for external UAE collection agencies for operational coordination, reporting, and communication governance. - Manage the end-to-end performance of collection agencies by monitoring recovery, operational, and compliance KPIs. - Ensure timely and accurate submission of agency reports covering customer calls, SMS, emails, and all other collection activities. - Validate, reconcile, and maintain the accuracy and completeness of agency-submitted data while ensuring adherence to reporting standards and SLAs. - Proactively resolve reporting discrepancies, data gaps, and delayed submissions with collection agencies. - Conduct regular audits of collection activities and call recordings to ensure compliance with CBUAE regulations, internal policies, and approved customer treatment standards. - Evaluate agency quality and compliance performance through structured call audits, communication reviews, and performance assessments. - Provide actionable feedback, coaching recommendations, and corrective action plans to improve agency performance and compliance. - Prepare and distribute periodic operational, compliance, and performance reports to internal stakeholders and leadership. - Support vendor governance initiatives, including agency onboarding, periodic business reviews, SLA monitoring, and continuous performance improvement. - Partner with internal teams, including Operations, Product, Risk, Legal, and Compliance, to resolve operational issues and enhance collection processes. ### Your expertise: - Bachelor’s degree / Graduate qualification in Finance, Economics, Engineering, Business Administration, or a related field. - 2–3 years of experience in collections, operations, risk management; experience managing teams or agencies is an advantage. - Experience of working in collection agencies or a Fintech in similar geographies (UAE / GCC / MENA) is preferred. - Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with hands-on proficiency in Excel. - Ability to quickly learn and adapt to new processes, systems, and regulatory requirements. - Excellent written and verbal communication skills in Arabic and English.