Portfolio Performance

Key Responsibilities

Portfolio Performance & Early Warning

• Own ongoing monitoring of the live lending portfolio across products, employers and customer segments.
• Develop and maintain portfolio performance views including collection rates, FPD, PAR, vintage/cohort performance, roll rates, cure rates and portfolio loss rates.
• Analyse performance by employer, product, ticket size, tenor and other relevant risk dimensions.
• Identify emerging deterioration and concentration risks early and recommend appropriate interventions.
• Partner with Credit Risk to translate observed portfolio behaviour into changes to underwriting, eligibility, limits and credit policy where required.
• Establish clear portfolio thresholds, triggers and escalation protocols.

Collections Strategy & Operations

• Design and continuously improve end-to-end collections strategies across the delinquency lifecycle.
• Define treatment paths, contact strategies, escalation rules, repayment arrangements and recovery journeys for different customer segments.
• Own operational performance from the first failed repayment through cure, recovery or write-off.
• Build and manage early-stage tele-collections capability.
• Establish processes for customers who leave employment, drop off payroll or otherwise lose their primary repayment route.
• Drive strong cure rates while ensuring appropriate and respectful customer treatment.

Repayment & Collections Infrastructure

• Act as business owner for Seamless collections infrastructure and repayment capabilities.
• Work with Product and Engineering to improve payroll collections, direct debit/mandate solutions, payment retries, alternative payment channels and customer self-service repayment journeys.
• Manage relationships and performance with third-party collection/payment providers.
• Identify opportunities to replace manual processes and fragmented third-party solutions with scalable internal capabilities where commercially justified.
• Define business requirements for a collections management/orchestration platform as the portfolio scales.

Data, Automation & AI

• Partner with Data/CDS and Engineering to progressively automate portfolio monitoring and collections decisioning.
• Develop data-led customer segmentation and prioritisation for collections activity.
• Define use cases for predictive models, including probability of default/delinquency, cure propensity and next-best-action.
• Drive automation of reminders, payment retries, collections queues and treatment strategies where appropriate.
• Ensure collections decisions and interventions can be measured and continuously improved through experimentation.

Employer & Payroll Collections

• Partner closely with Customer Success to strengthen collections processes with employers and payroll teams.
• Establish early-warning mechanisms for employee resignation, termination, payroll suspension, and other employment changes.
• Monitor employer-level collection performance and escalate systemic payroll or remittance issues.
• Ensure employees leaving payroll are rapidly transitioned into appropriate alternative repayment journeys.

Recovery & External Partners

• Own performance of external recovery partners and agencies.
• Establish clear referral criteria, SLAs, recovery targets and reporting requirements.
• Monitor recovery rates, cost-to-collect and overall recovery economics.
• Recommend appropriate escalation and write-off actions in partnership with Credit Risk and Finance.

Finance & Reconciliation

• Partner with Finance to ensure alignment between scheduled collections, operational collection records and actual cash received.
• Support robust month-end reconciliation of collections and settlement positions with financing partners.
• Investigate and resolve material collection or settlement discrepancies.
• Ensure portfolio reporting reconciles appropriately with financier and financial reporting.

Cross-Functional Relationships

This role will operate as part of a cross-functional portfolio and collections capability and will work particularly closely with:

Credit Risk—underwriting performance, portfolio risk appetite, and policy feedback
Product—repayment and collections journeys
Engineering—integrations, automation, and collections infrastructure
Decisioning/Data—portfolio analytics, decisioning, and predictive models

Customer Success—employer relationships, payroll issues, and employee exits
Finance—cash, settlement, and financier reconciliation

Legal & Compliance—mandates, customer treatment, recovery practices, and regulatory requirements

External Partners—payment providers, collection agencies, and recovery partners

Team Leadership

The Portfolio Performance & Collections Lead will initially manage a lean team comprising:

• Portfolio/Collections Operations Analyst
• Collections Officers

The role will recommend how the team and technology capability should scale as the portfolio grows.

Key Performance Indicators

Performance will be assessed across measures including:

• Collection rate
• First Payment Default
• PAR7 / PAR30 / PAR60 / PAR90
• Roll rates and cure rates
• Portfolio/vintage loss rate
• Payroll-break resolution rate
• Recovery rate
• Cost-to-collect
• Employer-level collection performance
• Collections SLA adherence
• Accuracy and timeliness of portfolio reporting

• 5 – 8+ years' relevant experience in digital lending, consumer finance, fintech, banking or a comparable credit environment.
• Strong experience in at least two of the following: portfolio analytics, collections strategy, credit risk, lending operations or digital collections.
• Demonstrable ability to analyse lending portfolio data and translate insights into operational or policy decisions.
• Strong understanding of delinquency management, repayment journeys and collections lifecycle management.
• Experience working with digital payment/repayment infrastructure is highly desirable.
• Experience designing collections segmentation, treatment strategies or automated collections journeys is an advantage.
• Strong Excel/data analysis capability; SQL, BI tools or equivalent analytical capability is highly desirable.
• Experience working cross-functionally with Product, Engineering and Data teams.
• Experience managing teams and/or external collections partners.

What We Are Looking For

The successful candidate will be intellectually curious, commercially minded and comfortable moving between data and execution.

You should be able to interrogate a deteriorating portfolio, identify what is actually driving the movement, recommend an intervention, work with Product or Engineering to implement it, and then measure whether it worked.

We are specifically looking for someone who sees collections as a portfolio optimisation and technology problem, not simply a customer-calling function.