Senior Director of Underwriting, Fraud Monitoring & Boarding

Job description

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. How Jobgether works: We use an AI-powered matching process to ensure your application is reviewed quickly, objectively, and fairly against the role's core requirements. Our system identifies the top-fitting candidates, and this shortlist is then shared directly with the hiring company. The final decision and next steps (interviews, assessments) are managed by their internal team. We appreciate your interest and wish you the best! Why Apply Through Jobgether? Data Privacy Notice: By submitting your application, you acknowledge that Jobgether will process your personal data to evaluate your candidacy and share relevant information with the hiring employer. This processing is based on legitimate interest and pre-contractual measures under applicable data protection laws (including GDPR). You may exercise your rights (access, rectification, erasure, objection) at any time. #LI-CL1 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. This senior leadership role will own the operational backbone of merchant boarding, underwriting, fraud monitoring, and portfolio risk management for a rapidly scaling B2B payments platform. You will lead teams and modernize risk operations through automation, analytics, and practical AI-enabled decisioning. The role combines hands-on operational leadership with strategic influence across Product, Engineering, Compliance, Finance, Sales, and banking partners. You will help create faster, more consistent onboarding experiences while maintaining rigorous controls for higher-risk customers. A major focus will be turning payments, transaction, and accounts receivable data into actionable underwriting and monitoring signals. You will also help shape the operating model for future embedded lending capabilities. Success will be measured through stronger risk governance, improved decision speed, scalable processes, and disciplined portfolio performance.