Head of Credit Risk

Description

At Chexy, we're building modern financial tools for Canadians, starting with their largest expenses. We turn rent, mortgage, tuition, insurance, and other big bills into opportunities to build credit, earn rewards, and gain financial flexibility.

We're the first platform in Canada that lets users pay nearly any bill using their credit card, while unlocking meaningful benefits like cashback, points, and credit-building tools. With ~$2B in annual payment volume and hundreds of thousands of transactions a month, we're building financial infrastructure that needs to be fast, reliable, and bulletproof.

About the role

Chexy is launching its first credit product in early 2027, and we're looking for a Head of Credit Risk to build the credit function from the ground up and own it.

This is not an oversight role, and it is not a job where you review decisions other people make. You will make the decisions, and you will do the work.

You'll write our first credit policy, set the credit box, design line assignment and line management, build the loss forecast, stand up collections, and own the monitoring that tells us whether it's working. You'll pull your own data, build the first scorecards yourself, and be the accountable name on our loss number to our credit committee, our capital partners, and our board.

You'll report to our co-founder and CEO and work alongside a seasoned credit advisor who chairs our credit committee. You'll have real support and real independence: credit decisions are yours, and nobody in growth or product gets to move the cutoffs.

We care about judgment, speed and rigour. You should be equally comfortable writing a policy document, building a line assignment matrix in Python, walking a lender through your loss curve, and deciding on a Tuesday afternoon what to do about a segment that's underperforming.

The outcome

Launch a credit product in early 2027 with a credit function our board, capital partners and regulators trust, and a portfolio that performs to plan.

What you'll own

Credit policy and underwriting

• Write the credit policy: eligibility, verification, decisioning, exceptions, governance
• Set and tune the credit box using bureau data and, over time, our proprietary payment and cash-flow data
• Select and configure the decision engine and own the bureau relationships (Equifax and TransUnion)
• Design and run the pre-launch bureau retro study and the test-and-learn roadmap after launch

Line management

• Design line assignment at origination and the line increase and decrease strategy after it
• Balance customer need against exposure and funding cost, and measure revenue per dollar of line

Portfolio performance and loss forecasting

• Build the loss forecast and own it against actuals
• Build vintage, delinquency, roll-rate and utilization monitoring before the first account is booked
• Own loss provisioning with Finance

Collections and recoveries

• Stand up collections from scratch: strategy, timing, channels, agency selection, provincial rules
• Have it operational before the first delinquency, not after

Fraud

• Own credit-adjacent fraud strategy: application fraud, first-party fraud, account takeover
• Partner with our payments risk and engineering teams on tooling and signals

Governance and reporting

• Run the credit committee pack and present the book monthly
• Own credit reporting to capital partners, including eligibility criteria and covenant metrics, with Finance
• Own credit bureau reporting and, with counsel and compliance, our adherence to provincial consumer credit and collections rules
• Build the function in a way you'd be comfortable describing to a regulator

What success looks like

• We launch on time with a credit policy our credit committee, capital partners and board have approved.
• Monitoring exists before the first account, collections is ready before the first missed payment, and bureau reporting is accurate from day one.
• In the first 90 days, approval rates, line strategy and early delinquency are reviewed weekly and the credit box is tuned on evidence, not opinion.
• Losses land within plan, and when a segment drifts, we know within days and act within a week.
• By the end of year one, our proprietary payment and cash-flow data is a documented input to underwriting, not a hypothesis.
• The function has a documented governance cycle, a first hire under you, and could withstand a regulator's questions.

What we're looking for

• 8+ years in consumer credit risk, with time spent personally owning underwriting policy and loss outcomes for an unsecured revolving product
• Canadian credit experience: Equifax and TransUnion Canada data, provincial consumer credit and collections rules, bureau reporting
• Hands-on SQL and Python. You still pull your own data and will for the next 18 months
• You have set cutoffs and line strategies, watched the outcomes, and changed your mind based on them
• You have built or materially changed a loss forecast and been held to it
• Comfortable presenting to a board, a credit committee or a capital partner, and defending a number under questioning
• Exposure to collections strategy and fraud strategy, not just acquisitions
• Builder mindset: you've worked where the infrastructure didn't exist yet, or you've wanted to
• Startup or fintech lending experience is a plus, not a requirement. So is having lived through a credit cycle as a decision-maker

This probably isn't the role for you if

• You need a team of analysts to function
• You prefer overseeing credit decisions to making them
• You want a second-line role reviewing other people's policy
• You think launch-stage credit is a modelling problem rather than a judgment problem
• You'd rather not be the accountable name on the loss number

Why Join Chexy?

• Build a credit function from zero: Set policy for a portfolio from the first account, with decisions that are actually yours
• Underwrite with data most issuers don't have: Years of bill-payment history and cash-flow data on hundreds of thousands of Canadians
• Join a tight-knit team: Work directly with the founders, with a seat at the table on the biggest bet the company is making
• Significant equity: Comp sized for someone building a core function this early, with real upside
• Toronto office: We work in-office 5 days a week

How We Hire

We keep our hiring process clear and human. You'll go through a mix of conversational interviews and a practical case: we'll give you a slice of data and ask you to define a launch credit box, a line assignment approach and a first-year loss estimate, then talk it through with us. We'll also ask to read a policy document you've written.

We use AI tools to help us organize and review applications; every decision about who we interview and who we hire is made by a person. This posting is for an existing vacancy. If you interview with us, we'll let you know within days of your last interview whether a decision has been made.

Chexy is an equal opportunity employer. If you require any accommodations or support during the hiring process, let us know and we'll do our best to help.

Know someone who would be a perfect fit? Let them know!