Director / VP of Fraud

Job description

**About Us:** We give businesses and their customers peace of mind by solving complex credit challenges with precision, speed, and intelligence, combining deep expertise with advanced technology, to simplify the experience and deliver better outcomes, every time. We're a fast-growing fintech empowering enterprise merchants with smarter, more adaptive pay-over-time solutions. From point-of-sale financing to “Buy Now, Pay Later” programs and loyalty integrated offers, we’re building configurable credit tools that help businesses serve more of their customers. We value teamwork, clarity of purpose, and rigorous attention to data to drive action. We balance speed and excellence to deliver an exceptional customer experience. **About the Role** The Director of Fraud Risk is a critical leadership position responsible for **protecting the integrity, assets, and reputation of the ClarityPay ecosystem**. You will own the end-to-end fraud management strategy, governance framework, and defense mechanisms across the customer lifecycle (from application/KYC to transactions and account servicing). This role requires an exceptional blend of strategic thinking, deep technical knowledge of fraud detection models, and the ability to balance the need for **industry-leading security** with our promise of a seamless, **easy, digital application** experience for customers. You will be directly accountable for managing the company's fraud losses within defined risk appetite limits. **Key Responsibilities: What You'll Do** **I. Strategy, Governance, and Financial Accountability** - **Fraud Risk Strategy Ownership:** Define, implement, and maintain the comprehensive enterprise-wide fraud risk management framework, policies, and standards (including prevention, detection, and response). - **Loss Minimization & Reporting:** Be accountable for total cost of risk, including fraud losses, cost of false positives, and operational expenses. Define Key Risk Indicators (KRIs), monitor performance against defined risk appetite, and prepare executive-level materials for senior governance forums. - **Risk Governance & Oversight (Second Line):** Provide independent risk oversight and effective challenge to the 1st Line Fraud Operations and Business Units, ensuring controls are documented, tested, and operating effectively. - **Incident Management & Remediation:** Oversee the fraud incident management lifecycle, ensuring timely escalation, root cause analysis, and effective, end-to-end remediation of control weaknesses. **II. Detection, Technology, and Execution** - **Identity & Authentication Strategy:** Lead the strategic implementation of robust Know Your Customer (KYC), Identity Verification (IDV), and anti-Account Takeover (ATO) protocols, leveraging advanced data and encryption technology to enhance security without creating unnecessary user friction. - **Advanced Analytics & Modeling:** Partner with Engineering and Data Science teams to drive the roadmap for automated risk capabilities, including the development, validation, and implementation of machine learning models and sophisticated rules engines to proactively identify and flag high-risk behavior. - **Channel and Partner Risk:** Develop robust monitoring and surveillance systems for the 1,900+ merchants and various distribution channels served by ClarityPay to detect coordinated fraud rings, anomalous origination patterns, and merchant performance risk. - **New Product Advisory:** Provide subject matter expertise and proactive risk advisory support for all new product launches, services, and strategic projects, ensuring controls are built in from the ground up (Shift-Left Risk Management). **Candidate Profile: What We Look For** - **Experience:** **8+ years** of progressive, hands-on experience in Risk Management, with at least **3-5 years in a leadership role** specifically focused on fraud detection and prevention within the FinTech, banking, or payments industry. - **Technical Acumen:** Deep expertise in the technical tools used for fraud defense, including rules engines, device intelligence, consortium data, and machine learning models. - **Data Proficiency:** Strong analytical mindset with expert experience in SQL and proficiency with Python or R for large-scale data manipulation, exploratory analysis, and pattern detection. - **Regulatory Knowledge:** Strong working knowledge of financial crime typologies and regulatory compliance requirements (e.g., related to KYC/AML) and industry best practices. - **Leadership & Communication:** Exceptional communication and presentation skills, with a proven ability to influence stakeholders, negotiate cross-functionally (Product, Engineering, Finance), and mentor a team of analysts. - **Cultural Fit:** A passion for honest financial products and transparency, and a proven ability to uphold our value of pushing the envelope by taking smart, accountable risks to innovate our fraud detection capabilities.