Senior Director of Underwriting, Fraud Monitoring & Boarding

What you'll do

Boarding & Underwriting Operations
• Lead a team of underwriters, risk analysts, and boarding specialists supporting both payments (PayFac/ISO) and lending applications.
• Redesign the boarding journey to be AI-first — straight-through approval for clean files, intelligent triage for exceptions, human review only where it adds judgment.
• Help define and operationalize risk appetite, credit policy, exposure limits, and approval guardrails across merchant segments, escalating exceptions through the appropriate leadership and governance forums.
• Support the operating rhythm for risk governance, including exception review, delegated authority workflows, escalation thresholds, and monthly reporting for senior leadership and sponsor bank partners.
 
Modern Decisioning Stack
• Partner with Product, Engineering, Compliance, and vendors to improve the technology stack for KYB/KYC, business verification, beneficial ownership, sanctions/PEP screening, fraud, bank/transaction data, and decision orchestration.
• Implement practical automation and AI-assisted document review for common underwriting materials, ensuring outputs are reviewable, auditable, and integrated into human decision workflows.
• Maintain clear controls around automated decisions, including decision logic documentation, override tracking, quality assurance, and periodic performance review.
 
Lending Underwriting
• Contribute to the buildout of the underwriting operating model for future embedded lending products, including application intake, policy translation, documentation requirements, line assignment inputs, and exception handling.
• Partner with Finance on portfolio performance, loss forecasting, vintage analysis, and reserve modeling.
• Partner with Finance and leadership to ensure underwriting practices, pricing inputs, and monitoring routines are aligned with the economics and risk profile of any future lending program.
• Establish servicing-side risk controls: early-warning triggers, collections strategy, and loss mitigation.

Portfolio Risk & Monitoring
• Own ongoing merchant monitoring, including transaction surveillance, chargeback and return analytics, behavioral anomaly detection, fraud indicators, ACH-return trends, and early signs of credit deterioration.
• Build dashboards and exposure reporting for executive and sponsor bank review.
• Lead reaction protocols for high-severity events (fraud rings, processor errors, funding disputes, NSFs, breaches of merchant agreement).
 
Compliance, Sponsor Bank & Network Relationships
• Ensure boarding and underwriting comply with NACHA, BSA/AML, OFAC, card brand rules, state lending laws, and sponsor bank requirements.
• Support consistent boarding, underwriting, and monitoring standards across U.S. and Canadian operations, partnering with Compliance on applicable jurisdictional requirements.
• Serve as a key operational contact with sponsor banks and processors on underwriting and risk matters, including audits, exception requests, file reviews, and policy alignment.
• Partner with Compliance and Legal on policy approvals, regulatory exam readiness, and audit response.
 
Leadership
• Build, coach, and scale a high-performing team across underwriting, boarding ops, risk analytics, and portfolio monitoring.
• Translate risk strategy into measurable SLAs and KPIs (time-to-decision, approval rate, fraud bps, loss rate, NPS for boarded merchants).

What We're Looking For

Required
• 8+ years of relevant experience in payments risk, merchant underwriting, boarding operations, credit risk, or financial services operations, with at least 3+ years leading teams or major operational workstreams.
• Deep knowledge of merchant underwriting: KYB/KYC, beneficial ownership, financial statement review, exposure modelling, MCC/industry risk, chargeback economics.
• Proven track record modernizing legacy boarding processes — implementing automated decisioning, vendor orchestration, and straight-through processing.
• Hands-on familiarity with modern risk and verification vendors (KYB/KYC, fraud, bank data aggregators, accounting connectors, decision orchestration platforms).
• Working knowledge of card brand rules, NACHA, BSA/AML, OFAC, and sponsor bank operating requirements.
• Experience operating in major card processor and sponsor bank environments.
• Strong analytical chops — fluent in SQL, comfortable with portfolio data, can interrogate model outputs and challenge analyst conclusions.
• Ability to use alternative data signals — such as AR/invoice data, payer behaviour,accounting-system data, or transaction flows — to improve underwriting, monitoring, or exception review processes.
• Pragmatic approach to automation and AI — able to identify use cases that improve speed and accuracy while maintaining auditable decisions and appropriate human oversight.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to explain underwriting decisions, operational tradeoffs, risk trends, and exceptions to senior stakeholders.
 
Preferred
• Prior lending exposure preferred, particularly in small business lending, working capital, MCA, factoring, term loans, or embedded finance; direct credit policy ownership is a plus but not required.
• Experience supporting the launch or operational scaling of a lending, credit, or embedded-finance product inside a payments, fintech, or B2B software company.
• Familiarity with AI/ML risk decisioning platforms (e.g., Sift, Sardine, Feedzai, Zest, Taktile, Oscilar, Unit21, Sentilink) and LLM-based document review tooling.
• Background in B2B / accounts receivable payments, embedded finance, or vertical SaaS.
• Exposure to model risk management frameworks (SR 11-7 or equivalent).
• Experience navigating sponsor bank audits and regulatory exams.
• Working understanding of lending economics, including credit facilities, covenants, advance rates, cost of capital, and how those inputs influence underwriting policy and pricing.
• Experience operating across multiple jurisdictions, including U.S. and Canadian payments or lending requirements; EU exposure is a plus.

What Success Looks Like (First 12 Months)

• AI-augmented document review live in underwriting workflow with measured accuracy and override tracking.
• Boarding and underwriting workflows redesigned with measurable reductions in decision
  time, clearer exception routing, improved SLA visibility, and increased straight-through processing for clean files.
• Risk governance cadence operating effectively with documented policies, decision authority, exception tracking, and monthly reporting for senior leadership and sponsor bank partners.
• Versapay’s proprietary AR/invoice data incorporated into underwriting and monitoring workflows, with early evidence of improved decision quality, faster reviews, or better risk segmentation.
•  Unified risk dashboard covering payments and lending exposure available to executives and sponsor bank partners.
• Fraud, loss, chargeback/return, and exception trends remain within agreed risk appetite, with clear escalation paths and sponsor bank relationships in good standing.