Head of Risk Underwriting

About this role

Amartha is a technology company focused on creating shared prosperity by developing digital financial solutions for the grassroots economy. Founded in 2010 as a microfinance institution, Amartha connects rural, women-led micro-enterprises with affordable capital. Amartha is expanding as a tech company, building a microfinance ecosystem that connects to the growing digital economy through capital, investment, and payment services.

By boosting the competitiveness of micro and small entrepreneurs, Amartha empowers women-led MSMEs, creates jobs, and fosters inclusive economic growth.

About The Role

This role will lead underwriting strategy and credit decisioning framework Micro Lending portfolio, ensuring sustainable growth through the right balance of risk, approval rate, customer quality, and commercial objectives.

The role is also accountable for designing and continuously improving underwriting policies, credit scorecards, decision engines, verification standards, and approval strategies.

Responsibilities

• Own the underwriting strategy for micro lending portfolios, by translating the company's risk appetite into practical credit acceptance criteria and underwriting policies
• Periodically review policies based on portfolio performance, market changes and emerging risks.
• Own the design and effectiveness of the credit decisioning framework, including Credit scorecards and risk segmentation, Credit bureau utilization, automated underwriting, Group/member-level assessment, Limit assignment, decline and referral strategies
• Monitor the relationship between underwriting decisions and subsequent portfolio performance, with key metrics such as approval rate, booking/disbursement rate, Cohort performance, Repayment rate.
• Embed fraud risk identification and prevention into the end-to-end underwriting process.
• Continuously review the underwriting process to support business growth while keeping the acceptable quality of new booking
• Work closely with Product, Data, Technology and Operations to build scalable underwriting capabilities.
• Managing and grow the team of analysts

Requirements

• Minimum bachelor's degree in Finance, Economics, Statistics, Mathematics, Engineering, Data Science or related field.
• Min 5+ years of experience in credit risk/underwriting within financial services
• At least 3 years in a leadership/managerial position.
• Strong experience in retail lending, consumer finance, digital lending, fintech, banking or multifinance.
• Strong understanding of Credit risk management, decision engines, Risk segmentation, Credit scoring, and risk performance monitoring
• Strong number/analytical capability and credit risk judgment
• Able to translate company growth strategy into a scalable credit strategy.
• Experience with SQL, Python/R, SAS, or similar analytics tools