Director, Small Business Credit Underwriting

Director, Small Business Credit Underwriting

Calling all innovators - find your future 're Fiserv, a global leader in Fintech and payments, and we move money and information in a way that moves the world. We connect financial institutions, corporations, merchants and consumers to one another millions of times a day - quickly, reliably, and securely. Any time you swipe your credit card, pay through a mobile app, or withdraw money from the bank, we're involved.

If you want to make an impact on a global scale, come make a difference at Fiserv.

You will lead manual underwriting for our small business lending portfolio. This is a hands-on leadership role: you will own day-to-day underwriting execution and credit decision quality on an existing team, scale that team as volume grows, and partner with decision science and product to push more of the decision into automated policy over time.

You will be responsible for bringing forward new data sources and new approaches to improve the credit decisioning framework. You will be accountable for both the credit outcome and for the throughput, turnaround time, and consistency of the decisions your team makes.

What you'll do:

• Own manual underwriting execution end to end: queue management, decision quality, turnaround time, and adherence to credit policy.
• Personally adjudicate and review the largest and most complex commercial exposures, including escalations and exceptions.
• Lead, coach, and grow a team of 8–10 underwriters across multiple locations; build the hiring, training, calibration, and QA structures that keep decisions consistent as the team scales.
• Define and manage the operating metrics for the function — capacity models, productivity, decision accuracy, override and exception rates — and act on what they show.
• Partner with decision science and credit policy to codify underwriter judgment into scorecards, rules, and automated decisioning; identify which decisions should stay manual and which should not.
• Contribute to credit policy development: document tiering, exception frameworks, and the thresholds that route a file to manual review.
• Work with product, engineering, and operations partners to improve the underwriting workflow and the tooling underwriters rely on.
• Represent underwriting in portfolio, loss, and audit reviews with credible, data-backed analysis.

Experience you will need to have:

• Bachelor's degree in finance, accounting, economics, or a related field.
• 10 years of experience in commercial or small business credit, with a track record of underwriting large-dollar commercial exposures and making the final call on them.
• Strong financial statement analysis skills — you can read a business's financials, bank statements, and cash flow and form an independent view of repayment capacity and risk.
• 5 years managing people, including direct leadership of teams of 5–10 or more; demonstrated ability to hire, develop, and retain underwriting talent.
• Operations management depth: experience running a production credit environment with SLAs, capacity constraints, and volume growth — and improving it measurably.
• Comfort with data. You use analytics to find where the process is leaking, and you can hold your own in a conversation with modelers and data scientists.
• Sound judgment under ambiguity, and the credibility to defend a credit decision to senior stakeholders.

Experience that would be great to have:

• Genuine interest in how AI and agentic tooling can be applied to commercial underwriting — document extraction, spreading, narrative analysis, exception handling — and a point of view on where it works and where a human still needs to decide.
• Experience with merchant cash advance, working capital, equipment finance, or embedded lending products.
• Exposure to alternative data in credit decisioning (payment processing data, bank transaction data, bureau attributes).
• Experience partnering with model development or decision science teams on automation of a manual process.

How you will work:

This role is on-site Monday through Friday. Fiserv considers in-person collaboration to be an essential part of this role as in-person office experience helps you with your overall…