Senior Manager Hardship

Job description

The Senior Manager, Hardship leads Hardship operations for Australia & New Zealand, ensuring customers experiencing financial difficulty receive fair, timely and practical support. The role balances customer outcomes, regulatory obligations, operational performance and continuous improvement. The role leads and motivates distributed teams, partners with Risk and Compliance, and strengthens hardship frameworks, controls and customer experience in line with community expectations and regulatory standards. The Senior Manager acts as Latitude’s hardship subject matter expert, maintaining strong relationships with financial counselling bodies, regulators and internal stakeholders while translating customer insights into clear actions for senior audiences. With a focus on simplification, risk management and sustainable change, the role drives operational uplift, supports technology and process initiatives, and ensures teams are equipped to deliver consistent, customer-first outcomes. Key Responsibilities Lead Hardship teams across Australia, New Zealand and the Philippines, building capability, engagement and consistent performance. Oversee complex hardship matters and escalations, including sensitive customer circumstances, high-risk cases and complaints linked to financial difficulty, ensuring decisions are fair, consistent and well documented. Manage BAU hardship operations, including performance, quality, coaching, portfolio reviews and regulatory adherence. Ensure hardship assessments, repayment arrangements and customer communications are completed consistently, transparently and in line with applicable credit, privacy, complaint handling and vulnerable customer obligations. Own hardship policies, procedures, controls, reporting and dashboards to identify trends, risks and improvement opportunities. Provide guidance to frontline and operational teams to improve early identification of hardship, vulnerability and complaint risk, and support consistent referral and resolution pathways. Lead regulatory, operational and customer experience initiatives from design through implementation. Represent Latitude with financial counsellors, consumer advocates and industry forums, sharing insights across the business. Build trusted relationships with executives, general managers, business SMEs, Risk, Compliance and external partners. Drive simplification, process improvement and technology-enabled change to improve efficiency, effectiveness and customer outcomes. Identify, escalate and mitigate operational, conduct and regulatory risks in partnership with Line 1 Risk and business leaders. Qualifications & Experience Relevant tertiary qualifications or demonstrated equivalent experience. Significant experience in banking, finance, hardship, collections, complaints, risk or a related customer care environment. Proven people leadership experience, including coaching, performance management and leading distributed teams through change. Strong understanding of hardship obligations, vulnerable customer care, operational risk and control management. Experience engaging senior leaders, regulators, financial counselling bodies and cross-functional stakeholders. Advanced communication, influencing, problem-solving and stakeholder management skills. Ability to use data, insights and reporting to improve performance, controls and customer outcomes. High level of personal drive, judgement and accountability in a regulated environment. Experience leading process improvement, simplification or transformation initiatives. Project management experience across process, technology and people change. Strong awareness of industry trends, community expectations and emerging hardship practices. Sometimes the best candidates don’t have 100% of what is listed above, but if you have most and are confident, you’d be a good fit, we’d love to hear from you! Sound like you? That's a good sign! In return for your energy and ideas, we offer a flexible working environment and great compensation. We always support a safe, healthy, engaging, and productive working environment for all employees and workers, whether that be in your home and office, or a combination of both. We make it possible – for our customers, our partners, and our people. We believe doing great work starts with feeling supported. Our values, take ownership , pursue excellence , win together , and create tomorrow , aren't just words. They show up in how we work, how we lead, and how we look after our team. We make it possible… to spend more time with your loved ones – with an extra week of paid leave each year through our Take 5 initiative. to balance work and life – with a hybrid working model, giving you the flexibility to work from home while connecting in the office. to put your wellbeing first – with Sonder , a 24/7 support app for mental and physical wellness. to access great financial benefits – with discounts on Latitude products and services. When our people thrive, everything else follows. Successful applicants will be required to complete a background check (including criminal history and bankruptcy check) prior to commencement of employment.