Head of Small Business Lending

Job-:
Risk & Compliance

Location:

United Kingdom Closes:
Base location - London preferred but some flexibility

Following the acquisition of Virgin Money, Nationwide is on a bold journey to build a credible, relationship-led Business Bank, combining strong customer advocacy, deep sector and local knowledge, sustainable growth and disciplined risk management, aligned to the benefits of being a modern  support of this ambition, we have a senior leadership opportunity to shape and develop our small business lending capability, ensuring we can make high-quality credit decisions for customers while safely scaling our business.

As Head of Small Business Lending, you’ll lead our small business credit risk decisioning capability across scored, automated and manual underwriting. You’ll shape how risk appetite, policy, scorecards, models, limits and controls translate into lending decisions, ensuring we deliver commercially effective, well-controlled and customer-focused outcomes.

Reporting to the Director of Business Credit, you’ll lead our Small Business Credit team and work closely with colleagues across Business Credit, Product, Distribution, Model Risk, Compliance, Technology and Operations. You’ll play a key role in developing a scalable credit decisioning capability that can support Nationwide’s ambitions for growth in small business banking.

Qualifications About You You’ll be an established credit risk leader with significant experience in small business, SME or relevant retail lending, including direct experience of scored and automated credit decisioning. You’ll combine deep credit expertise with a strong understanding of how technology, data and models can enable an effective and scalable lending proposition.

You’ll bring:
• Significant experience in credit risk, with direct exposure to scored and/or automated lending decisioning within a small business, SME or relevant retail lending environment.
• Strong understanding of credit scorecards, decisioning models, model governance, underwriting and portfolio management.
• Experience of building, developing or scaling automated credit decisioning capability, ideally across customer onboarding or point-of-sale lending journeys.
• The ability to use model, portfolio and customer-outcome data to understand performance, identify emerging risks and optimise lending decisions within agreed parameters.
• Strong understanding of the regulatory and control environment relevant to small business lending, including CONC where applicable.
• Strong commercial and risk judgement, with the ability to balance sustainable growth with customer outcomes, conduct and effective credit risk management.
• Experience leading and developing specialist credit teams, building capability and confidence as the lending proposition grows.
• Strong stakeholder management and influencing skills, with the ability to work effectively across Credit Risk, Product, Distribution, Technology, Operations, Model Risk and Compliance.

Above all, you’ll combine strong credit judgement with a real understanding of modern lending decisioning. You’ll be comfortable operating at both strategic and practical levels, shaping the future capability while staying close enough to portfolio and model performance to understand where intervention is needed.

This is an opportunity to play a significant role in building a small business lending capability that can scale with Nationwide’s ambitions, while maintaining strong risk discipline and delivering good outcomes for customers.

Your rewards

We continually review and evaluate our offering to ensure we have a broad range of market competitive benefits available for our colleagues. When you put a lot in, it’s only fair to expect a lot out. So, when you help us…