Senior Director, Risk and Underwriting (Payments/Fintech)

Responsibilities

• Underwriting
• Portfolio Risk
• Fraud monitoring, transaction monitoring alerts, ACH return-rate performance against NACHA thresholds, chargeback and dispute operations, and the KYC and KYB tooling stack, including vendor strategy across providers such as Verafin, Alloy, Middesk, and Socure alongside the card-side stack.
• Reserves
• Reserve methodology and management, including reserve sizing, release decisions, and the financial exposure conversations that come with them.
• Financial Institution Relationships
• Partnership with Compliance
• You partner with the Compliance function, which sits within Legal, as a peer relationship. Risk executes, Compliance assures, and the two functions stay tightly aligned without reporting into each other.
• Integration
• Your first year includes a defining integration project: reconciling two risk frameworks, two underwriting cultures, and two banking arrangements from a recent acquisition into one coherent program. This is a core function of the role and a key measure of success.

Requirements

• What You Bring
• Direct ownership of merchant or A2A risk and underwriting in a payments or fintech environment.
• Hands-on sponsor bank and ODFI accountability, not committee participation.
• Fluency across fraud strategy, chargeback and reserve management, and AML, KYC, and KYB program governance.
• Comfort with AI and automation-driven underwriting, and a bias toward building scalable systems over adding headcount.
• Credibility with auditors, network partners, and executive leadership.
• As well as being a par

Benefits

Additional Information

NMI is a payments platform that underwrites and bears risk across both card acceptance and account-to-account products, including ACH, RTP, and FedNow. We oversee risk on roughly $1B in annual card volume and an $80B+ A2A program, moving funds through wholesale ISO distribution, ISV partnerships, and direct merchant relationships, with third-party sender activity through ODFI and sponsor bank arrangements. We are hiring a Senior Director of Risk and Underwriting to own this function end to end. This role combines strategic leadership with day-to-day operational accountability. The right person writes the risk frameworks and then runs them. They review the hard files personally, sit in the room for sponsor bank and network conversations, and stay close enough to the portfolio to catch problems before the bank does. This leader builds, decides, and executes every day. The mandate is enabling aggressive growth safely. The company is scaling merchant onboarding velocity, expanding payout volume, and adding banking infrastructure. Every one of those moves runs through this role. We need someone who finds thoughtful ways to say yes, treats risk appetite as a daily decision rather than an annual document, and sees disciplined risk management as a competitive advantage that lets the business move faster than its peers. Reports to: Chief Operating Officer Location: Remote, US. Travel to financial institution partners and team sites as needed. Direct reports: Risk and underwriting leadership across card and A2A, including current interim leadership.

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