Senior Product Manager, Collections & Recoveries

Senior Product Manager, Collections & Recoveries | An Emerging-Markets Lender | 6-Month Contract | Remote (UK) | Competitive Rate

I'm working with an established lender that provides short-term working capital to micro and small businesses in emerging markets. Their customers are shopkeepers, market traders and small manufacturers, people who are shut out of formal banking because they have no credit history and nothing to put up as security.

The business has been doing this for over a decade and is profitable, certified as a B Corporation, and lends at real scale. What makes it work is the combination: data-led underwriting plus a large field network that visits the business, sizes the loan against what the owner can actually repay, and stays in contact. On-time repayment sits above 90% in a market where the wider banking sector is running non-performing loans in the mid-teens.

They're hiring a Senior Product Manager on a six-month contract to own repayment, collections and recoveries.

Why this one is worth a look

Collections product roles usually mean squeezing a legacy dialler and defending a cost line. This is not that.

This is the first senior product hire dedicated to the space, so you're not inheriting someone else's roadmap. You own the strategy, the measurement framework and the priorities across pre-due, early arrears and later-stage recoveries. And the customer outcome genuinely matters here, both because it is written into how the business is run and because treating people badly wrecks a portfolio built on repeat lending.

What you'll own

Four things, and they run in sequence.

Predict. Work with Credit Risk and Data on segmentation and early-warning indicators, so you know who is heading for trouble before they get there.

Prevent. Design the repayment journeys across mobile money, app, USSD, messaging, voice and assisted channels, so the miss does not happen in the first place.

Recover. Improve case management, call-centre tooling, field workflows and back-office productivity so the right cases get worked first.

Prove. Build the baselines, the dashboards and the controlled pilots. Within 90 days there needs to be a trusted performance baseline covering on-time repayment, cost-to-collect and portfolio-at-risk, plus a prioritised roadmap with business cases behind it. Within six months, at least two measurable improvements shipped and a segmented or early-warning treatment strategy live in pilot.

There's also a junior Product Manager in the team to mentor.

Who this suits

Seven or more years in product management, with at least three of those in lending, credit servicing, collections or recoveries. You need to be able to talk about roll rates, cure rates, cost-to-collect and champion-challenger testing without anyone having to explain them.

Working SQL and self-serve product analytics. Cohort analysis, funnels, experiment design. You run your own numbers rather than waiting on an analyst.

Evidence that you have actually moved something. Repayment rates, portfolio performance, operational efficiency, customer outcomes. A number that was one thing when you arrived and a better thing when you left.

The stakeholder piece is the one people underestimate. Credit Risk owns policy, the Head of Collections owns execution, Engineering owns delivery. You own none of it and have to align all of it, up to and including EXCO. If you've only ever worked where product had formal authority, this will be harder than it looks.

Emerging markets, mobile money or financial inclusion experience is a strong plus rather than a requirement. So is anything with a customer-protection or responsible-lending angle.

The setup

Six-month contract, competitive day rate, fully remote from the UK.

The working day skews early to overlap with the operating markets, roughly 08:00 to 14:00 UK in summer. For a lot of people that is an upside rather than a compromise. There is some international travel, discussed at first conversation.

Interested, or know someone who might be? Send a CV or a message to nr@redcat-digital.com.

Neil Rogers | RedCat Digital

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