Senior Director, Risk and Underwriting – Payments/Fintech

• Underwriting policy and execution across the combined portfolio: card merchants, A2A clients, ISO and ISV sub-merchant populations, and high-velocity onboarding programs.
• This includes the mass onboarding and underwriting models that must support a step change in boarding velocity over the next two quarters.
• Fraud monitoring, transaction monitoring alerts, ACH return-rate performance against NACHA thresholds, chargeback and dispute operations, and the KYC and KYB tooling stack, including vendor strategy across providers such as Verafin, Alloy, Middesk, and Socure alongside the card-side stack.
• Reserve methodology and management, including reserve sizing, release decisions, and the financial exposure conversations that come with them.
• You are the operating face of risk to our financial institution partners.
• That means principal-level credibility with sponsor banks and ODFIs, participation in new banking relationship buildouts, and exam and audit readiness across BSA and AML, OFAC, state money transmission licensing, and network compliance.
• You partner with the Compliance function, which sits within Legal, as a peer relationship.
• Your first year includes a defining integration project: reconciling two risk frameworks, two underwriting cultures, and two banking arrangements from a recent acquisition into one coherent program. This is a core function of the role and a key measure of success.

Requirements

• You have built or scaled a risk and underwriting function inside a regulated payments business: an acquirer, payfac, processor, or A2A platform.
• You are deep in either card or ACH risk and fluent in the other.
• You have owned a sponsor bank or ODFI relationship as the accountable party, not as a participant.
• You have managed reserves, navigated examinations, and made underwriting calls on businesses where the answer was not obvious.
• Eight or more years of relevant experience, or equivalent operational depth.
• You lead small senior teams and multiply them.
• You communicate risk simply to people who do not live in it, including executives, bankers, and salespeople.
• You are accountable for both portfolio outcomes and business growth, approaching risk decisions with the mindset of finding a responsible path to approval whenever the facts support it.