Head of Product (Borrow)

About Salary Finance

Working with employers, we provide a financial wellbeing platform as an employee benefit, helping employees to understand their money better, get out of debt faster and save for their future. We already have a reach of circa 4,000,000 employees through our relationships with over 500 of the largest employers in the UK.

By improving employee financial wellbeing, we have a very real and meaningful impact on people’s lives. We remove the stress and worry associated with financial difficulties by dramatically reducing the interest rates employees pay on their personal debt, and provide them with the tools needed to start saving sooner and be more financially secure. We are backed by some of the biggest brands, including investments from Blenheim Chalcot (the UK’s leading venture builder), Legal and General (the FTSE 100 insurer and asset manager), Experian and Goldman Sachs, and funding partnerships with JP Morgan and Blue Owl.

Launched in 2015, we have made excellent progress, and are scaling fast. We have been named BITC’s Responsible Business of Year, included in KPMG’s Global Fintech 100, listed top of the Forbes' list of socially-responsible startups, and profiled by the Financial Times, the Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, the Telegraph, CityAM and the Institute of Directors.

Your role in our mission

As Head of Product for Borrow, you'll own our lending products from the moment a customer starts an application to the day their loan is repaid. You'll lead two product squads: one covering everything up to the point the money is paid out, and one covering everything after it. You’ll be accountable for helping more employees borrow with us, and for making sure every loan is run accurately and fairly, with customers well supported from application to final repayment. You'll report to the Product Director.

How Borrow works

We lend to employees through their employer. Three parties are involved:

• Customers are employees who take out a loan with us.
• Employers deduct repayments from pay and give us the data we need to confirm customers are who they say they are.
• Salary Finance is the lender, responsible for the application, the payout and the life of the loan.

Taking repayments straight from salary means much lower credit losses than other lenders, and we pass that saving on to customers as a lower rate. It also makes lending harder to run. Repayments follow payroll, so loans are repaid weekly, fortnightly, four-weekly or monthly. Customers can change payroll at any time. Employers pay us in bulk, and we reconcile each payment to individual loans.

What you'll own

Before payout

• Growth in applications and originations across direct, aggregator and returning-customer channels
• The application journey and its conversion across each of these channels
• Our range of lending products, including personal loans, top-up loans and debt consolidation, plus exploring opportunities such as open banking in underwriting

After payout

• The customer’s experience after payout; seeing their balance, making repayments, settling early and getting help, in the app and online
• Our Loan Engine; so every customer’s interest, payments and balance are right
• Regulatory documents; from credit agreements to notices of default, accurate and automated, so customers always know where they stand
• Support for customers who fall behind; from early contact and self-service through to forbearance, collections and debt sale

What you’ll do

• Set the direction: shape the Borrow product strategy and roadmap in line with company objectives with the Product Director and CPO - framed as customer and commercial outcomes to move rather than features to ship
• Be the voice of the customer: use customer client and colleague feedback alongside the data, so improvements reach the people who use and buy our products
• Improve the journey: make sure your teams are always finding and testing ways to improve the customer’s experience, from conversion through to managing and repaying their loan
• Lead the team: develop the team (including both Product Managers and Product Design), giving them clear outcomes and the room to own how they get there. Coach them on how they decide what to build, not only how they deliver it
• Measure what matters: make sure the tooling and reporting exist to measure every product, track commercial and customer outcomes, run experiments and, and make decisions on the evidence
• Make trade-off decisions: use evidence of what will move the outcome to decide what to do and what not to do. When there is more demand than capacity, make the choice explicit and agree it with the business before delivery starts
• Work across the business: partner with stakeholders across the business, from Credit Risk and Compliance to Finance and Engineering, so that products land on time, to quality and within regulatory boundaries
• Get compliance right: make sure customers receive the correct regulatory communications on time, every time, and own the evidence that Borrow delivers good outcomes and fair value under Consumer Duty
• Represent Borrow: prepare and present Borrow papers for our Product Oversight Committee

About you

• Consumer lending experience: significant product leadership in UK consumer lending, in a regulated business. This is essential.
• Customer-obsessed: you talk to customers and clients regularly, run research yourself, and can point to decisions you changed, and things you decided not to build, because of what you heard. You know many borrowers are under financial pressure, and you design for good outcomes as well as conversion
• A leader of product managers: you have led Product Managers and grown their capability, and you lead through them
• Data-driven: you can find the answer in a conversion funnel or a loan book yourself. You write SQL and you are quick in Excel.
• Lending and regulation: you know how a loan works underneath, from interest and repayment schedules to arrears and forbearance, and the FCA rules around it, including the Consumer Credit Act, CONC and Consumer Duty. You know which regulatory communications customers must receive and when, and why every calculation and letter has to be right
• Operationally minded: you design processes that scale, run efficiently and stay compliant
• A clear communicator: concise in writing and in the room, with audiences from engineers to the board
• Comfortable with tension and ambiguity: you can own a growth target and a control environment at the same time, make the call when the answer isn’t clear, and change course when the evidence or a better argument says so
• Technically fluent: you can hold your own with engineers on architecture and root causes, and they trust your judgement on trade-offs
• AI-fluent: you use AI tools every day to speed up analysis, discovery and writing, you help your team do the same, and you know where human checks matter most, especially on calculations and anything customer-facing

Nice to have

• Have worked on a B2B2C or employer-channel product
• Have led a loan servicing rebuild or a loan book migration from the product side
• Have experience in collections, arrears or debt sale
• Have worked with aggregators or price comparison sites

Who you are

We embrace our differences but there’s one thing we like to share - our values, so it’s important to us that you are:

• Fearless, and able to make the impossible possible.
• Responsible, and want to help build a business that delivers a meaningful difference to society.
• Dedicated and want to commit to an exciting journey even through the highs and lows.
• Empathetic and truly care about every colleague and customer.
• United, because you understand we achieve more when we work as a team.
• Humble, and take feedback as a way to continuously improve.

What do you get for all your hard work?

• Company bonus scheme 💰
• 25 days holiday increasing by one day for every year of service up to 30 days, plus a day off for your birthday 🎂
• Hybrid working arrangements so you can work from the office and from home with a budget to help you get set up 🏠
• Generous company benefits to include pension and life assurance and an annual allowance to spend on medical insurance, health cash plan, denplan, gym memberships 🤸
• Enhanced policies that are family and pet friendly, to include company sick pay and peternity leave 🐶
• Great career development in a fast paced environment 🚀
• Regular company socials
• Volunteer days as part of our CSR program 🤝
• More great perks to include weekly snacks, tuckshop, cycle to work, help to save and much more! 🍭

The typical interview process

• Introductory call with our Talent Manager (phone call - 30 mins)
• 1st Stage: Technical interview with Hiring Manager and team (video call - 60 mins)
• 2nd Stage: Past work experience and culture interview with Hiring Manager and team (in person - 60 mins)

We’re looking for people that will get stuck in and make a difference. We have a great collaborative, entrepreneurial team that are passionate about what they do. If you want to join a team that is changing people’s lives for the better then we’d love to hear from you.

Learn more at salaryfinance.com

Salary Finance is proud to be an equal opportunities employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive work environment where all employees and applicants can flourish.