- The Portfolio Performance & Collections Lead will own the performance of Seamless' lending portfolio from disbursement through repayment, cure, recovery, or write-off. The role will build and lead Seamless collections capability across payroll collections, digital repayment channels, early-stage collections, delinquency management, and recovery. It will also establish the portfolio analytics and early-warning framework required to identify emerging risk before it translates into material losses. This is not a traditional debt recovery role. We are looking for a highly analytical operator who can combine portfolio management, collections strategy, technology, data, and operational execution to build a scalable collections capability as our Embedded Finance portfolio grows.
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.
- 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.
- 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 Riskunderwriting performance, portfolio risk appetite, and policy feedback
- Productrepayment and collections journeys
- Engineeringintegrations, automation, and collections infrastructure
- Decisioning/Dataportfolio analytics, decisioning, and predictive models
- Customer Successemployer relationships, payroll issues, and employee exits
- Financecash, settlement, and financier reconciliation
- Legal & Compliancemandates, customer treatment, recovery practices, and regulatory requirements
- External Partnerspayment providers, collection agencies, and recovery partners
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.