Risk & Credit Manager
Location: Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Employment Type: Full-Time
Industry: Fintech / BNPL
A fast-growing fintech startup in Riyadh is looking for an experienced Risk & Credit Manager to lead and strengthen its credit risk framework, underwriting strategy, and portfolio performance.
The ideal candidate will have hands-on experience within fintech, Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL), digital lending, consumer finance, or a similar credit-driven environment, with a strong understanding of data-led credit decisioning and risk management.
Key Responsibilities
- Develop, implement, and continuously enhance the company's credit risk policies, underwriting criteria, and risk appetite framework.
- Manage the end-to-end credit risk lifecycle, including customer assessment, approval strategies, portfolio monitoring, and collections performance.
- Design and optimize credit decisioning rules, scorecards, limits, and approval thresholds.
- Monitor portfolio quality, delinquency trends, default rates, loss ratios, and other key credit risk indicators.
- Conduct regular portfolio analysis to identify emerging risks, customer behavior trends, and areas for optimization.
- Work closely with Product, Data, Technology, Finance, Operations, and Collections teams to improve risk decisioning and customer experience.
- Support the development and implementation of automated and data-driven underwriting models.
- Review credit performance across different customer segments, products, merchants, and acquisition channels.
- Establish early-warning indicators and recommend corrective actions to manage credit exposure.
- Develop management dashboards and provide regular reporting on portfolio performance and credit risk metrics.
- Support fraud-risk initiatives and collaborate with relevant teams to identify suspicious customer or transaction behavior.
- Ensure credit policies and processes remain aligned with applicable Saudi regulatory requirements and internal governance standards.
- Support new product launches by conducting risk assessments and defining appropriate credit controls.
- Manage and mentor members of the credit and risk team as the business scales.
Requirements
- Bachelor's degree in Finance, Economics, Business, Statistics, Risk Management, or a related field.
- 5–7 years of relevant experience in credit risk, underwriting, lending, or portfolio risk management.
- Strong experience within Fintech, BNPL, digital lending, consumer finance, or financial services is required.
- Proven experience managing consumer or SME credit portfolios and developing credit policies.
- Strong understanding of credit scoring, underwriting models, delinquency management, portfolio analytics, and risk monitoring.
- Experience working with large datasets and using data to support credit decisions.
- Strong analytical and problem-solving capabilities.
- Familiarity with credit bureau data and alternative data sources is highly desirable.
- Good understanding of the Saudi financial services and fintech environment is an advantage.
- Strong stakeholder-management skills with the ability to work across Product, Technology, Finance, Operations, and senior leadership.
- Excellent communication and presentation skills.
Preferred Profile
We are looking for a commercially minded risk professional who can balance growth, customer experience, and credit quality. The successful candidate will be comfortable working in a fast-paced startup environment, building scalable risk frameworks, and using data to make informed credit decisions.
