Principal Analyst

Our mission-driven team is dedicated to fostering financial inclusion, serving billions of deserving individuals who have been overlooked by traditional finance. We are a collective of finance, analytics, and technology professionals committed to addressing the credit, savings, and financial needs of the underserved.

This pivotal role will be responsible for guiding credit policy decisions throughout the customer lifecycle and managing the Lending Portfolio's Profit & Loss (P&L) KPIs. This involves ensuring robust risk performance while simultaneously driving top-line revenue targets through the identification of expansion opportunities within our partner customer segments, including banks and telecommunications companies.

What We Seek:

• Passion for Analytics: A deep understanding of advanced, data-driven credit strategies and models is essential. You should possess hands-on experience and a proven track record of successfully delivering projects independently.
• Process Orientation: We need someone who can contribute to building efficient operational processes that effectively manage risk across multiple lending cycles. A keen focus on data collection and analysis to inform business iterations and improvements is critical.
• Stakeholder Management: Demonstrated ability to cultivate strong relationships and drive business outcomes by collaborating effectively with internal and external cross-functional partners.
• Proactive and Adaptable: In a dynamic startup environment, responsibilities evolve rapidly. We are looking for an individual comfortable with calculated risks and navigating ambiguity.

Key Responsibilities:

• Portfolio Strategy & Credit Policy: Develop comprehensive credit strategies to support go-to-market (GTM) initiatives, define customer eligibility criteria, and manage limit/exposure decisions across the loan lifecycle, leveraging data from telecommunications, wallets, credit bureaus, and mobile applications. Optimize customer journeys and ongoing communications through various digital channels (Mobile App, SMS, USSD, OBD) to enhance usage, credit education, and repayment. Collaborate with external debt collection agencies and refine direct debit rules to improve collection effectiveness for delinquent customer segments and optimize collection offers. Establish frameworks for periodically measuring the performance of existing strategies.
• Portfolio Monitoring & Governance: Design and implement portfolio tracking metrics and reports, working closely with the technology team. Monitor pending PDD (Post-Disbursement Documentation) MIS, follow up on outstanding PDDs, and ensure pendency remains within acceptable limits. Coordinate with partner teams on the due/overdue PDD process. Propose and implement solutions in conjunction with data science, product, and business operations teams to maintain a healthy portfolio.

Required Qualifications & Skills:

• Expertise in scorecards, credit policies, and risk management, particularly in an unsecured lending context.
• A minimum of 2 years of hands-on experience as a data-driven strategy/policy analyst.
• Strong analytical thinking and problem-solving aptitude. Proficiency in SQL, Python, and PySpark SQL (Big Data Hadoop/Spark Stack) is highly preferred.
• A passion for utilizing data and algorithms to inform underwriting decisions. Prior exposure to Machine Learning (ML) algorithms is a plus.
• A robust entrepreneurial drive.