Senior Credit Strategy Manager

About Abound

We’re redefining consumer lending in the UK, and beyond. Using advanced AI and Open Banking data, we make fair, affordable personal finance available to more people. While traditional lenders rely almost entirely on credit scores, we look at the full financial picture - how much you spend, and what you can afford to repay to build a deeper, more accurate understanding of each customer's unique financial situation.

And we've shown it works at scale. We’ve issued over £1.3bn in loans directly to customers while delivering market-leading credit performance - for every 10 defaults the industry expects, we see only 3. We also reached profitability just 2.5 years after launch.

Backed by £2bn+ of funding from top-tier investors including Citi, GSR Ventures, and Deutsche Bank, we’re recognised as one of Europe’s fastest-growing fintechs (Sifted, CNBC). Now, we’re expanding into new markets and product lines - and we’re looking for ambitious people who want to learn fast, take ownership, and grow with us.

About The Role

We are hiring a Senior Credit Strategy Manager to lead the growth and performance of our Express / Mid-prime segment, one of our highest-priority areas. This is unsecured personal lending in the higher-APR mid-prime space (30% - 50% APR), with loans typically from £2,000 to £10,000, and customers acquired primarily through price-comparison and aggregator marketplaces. Our ambition is to scale this segment substantially while improving its economics, and this role owns the credit strategy that makes that possible.

This role sits at the intersection of credit risk and commercial strategy. It is about making better decisions on who we serve, how we quote and offer them at the point of acquisition, how we underwrite, how we manage portfolio performance, and how we grow profitably and at pace.

We are looking for someone with strong credit judgement and sharp commercial instinct, someone who can combine risk discipline with a real understanding of growth, customer outcomes, and contribution economics. The defining challenge of the role is balance: building a portfolio of genuinely good credit quality while taking volume up by an order of magnitude. You will need to know, in detail, how those two objectives can be reconciled in this segment rather than traded off against each other.

Our decisioning is built on Open Banking and cashflow underwriting rather than credit scores alone. For a higher-APR population acquired through marketplaces, seeing real affordability is what lets us select and price better than the market. The art of the role is commercial as much as analytical: capturing that data advantage while managing its effect on conversion, so that better selection and profitable growth move together rather than against each other.

The role requires a hands-on operator who is comfortable getting into the detail of credit performance, pricing and offer strategy, underwriting, segmentation, and monitoring, while also shaping the broader direction of the Express / Mid-prime portfolio. You will work closely with risk, product, commercial, and data science teams to ensure credit strategy is effective, pragmatic, and aligned with our growth objectives.

This is a senior hire. We are looking for someone who brings directly relevant experience, sound judgement, and the confidence to set direction and move quickly in a fast-moving environment.

What you'll be doing

• Own the design, execution, and ongoing refinement of credit strategy for the Express / Mid-prime segment, with direct accountability for the balance between growth and credit quality.

• Lead how we quote and offer customers across aggregator and price-comparison marketplaces, optimising risk-based pricing, eligibility, and offer presentation to win the right customers at the point of acquisition.

• Understand and actively manage adverse selection in marketplace-acquired lending, designing the offer, pricing, and decisioning strategy to attract the customers we want and screen out the risk we do not.

• Partner with data science to ensure our credit models are properly calibrated, adjusted, and retrained for the specific dynamics of this population, rather than inherited from prime or adjacent segments.

• Use credit risk insight and commercial judgement to optimise portfolio economics, balancing growth, loss rates, approval rates, pricing, and customer quality so that the segment scales profitably.

• Monitor portfolio performance across the customer lifecycle, identifying emerging trends, risks, and opportunities within the Express / Mid-prime population.

• Shape underwriting strategy, segmentation, credit policy, and decisioning logic in partnership with risk, product, and data science teams.

• Evaluate the impact of strategy and pricing changes, and translate analysis into clear recommendations for action.

• Own the quality, clarity, and usefulness of management information (MI) and performance reporting for the segment, and define the metrics, monitoring, and risk reporting frameworks that support consistent decision-making.

• Partner with product, commercial, and data teams to assess new initiatives, customer segments, product changes, and growth opportunities through a credit risk lens.

• Identify and escalate emerging risks, adverse trends, or concentration issues, while highlighting opportunities to improve strategy performance.

• Contribute to governance forums and senior discussions with clear, structured updates on portfolio performance, strategy effectiveness, and key risk themes.

• Support external reviews, audits, funding discussions, and due diligence where required, particularly in relation to portfolio performance and credit strategy.

Who You Are

• A strong credit risk and strategy professional who combines analytical rigour with commercial thinking, and who is energized by the challenge of scaling a higher-risk segment profitably.

• Deeply comfortable operating at the intersection of risk and growth, and able to make decisions that genuinely serve both rather than defaulting to caution.

• Fluent in the mechanics of marketplace acquisition: how customers are quoted and offered on aggregators, how pricing and eligibility shape the book you end up with, and how adverse selection plays out if it is not actively managed.

• Commercially astute about the trade-offs of richer data: alert to the fact that deeper affordability assessment can affect conversion, and motivated by the challenge of capturing its full value without sacrificing growth.

• Hands-on and detail-oriented, but also able to step back and think strategically about portfolio direction and business priorities.

• Confident challenging assumptions, interpreting performance trends, and turning analysis into practical action.

• Commercially aware, with a strong grasp of unit economics and a clear understanding that credit strategy decisions need to work for both portfolio performance and ambitious growth.

• Credible and collaborative, with the ability to work effectively across risk, product, commercial, and data science teams.

• Structured, proactive, and comfortable operating in a scaling environment where priorities evolve quickly and ownership is expected.

Experience & Background

• Significant experience in credit risk, credit strategy, or portfolio management within consumer lending, in a role where you were accountable for commercial outcomes and not only reporting.

• Direct, hands-on experience in higher-APR unsecured personal lending, typically in the c.30 to 50% APR range, with customers acquired through price-comparison and aggregator marketplaces. This is the core of the role, and we are specifically looking for people who have done it.

• A strong, practical understanding of adverse selection in marketplace-acquired lending and the levers that mitigate it: offer and pricing strategy, eligibility design, and decisioning.

• Experience working with data science teams to adjust, recalibrate, and retrain credit models for a specific customer segment, and a clear understanding of why models built for prime or adjacent populations do not transfer unchanged.

• A proven ability to balance risk appetite, approval rates, losses, pricing, and growth objectives, and to scale volume materially while protecting credit quality.

• Experience using analysis and portfolio insight to influence business and strategy decisions, not just to report on outcomes.

• Experience across one or more consumer lending products such as Unsecured Personal Loans (UPL), BNPL, credit cards, or adjacent products.

• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to present clearly and credibly to senior stakeholders.

• Comfortable working closely with data scientists and analytical teams, but this is not a pure technical data science role.

• This is not an entry-level position. We are looking for someone with the experience and judgement to operate as a senior individual contributor or manager-level leader.

What we offer: