Strategy Lead

You Lend is building the leading embedded finance platform for small businesses. We work with partners including Amazon, eBay, Shopify, Stripe and Square to give merchants fast, flexible access to funding. We are growing quickly across the UK, Europe and the US. Our next stage of growth will come from scaling our largest partnerships, improving our lending products and investing in the right new products and markets.

The Strategy Lead will own a portfolio of You Lend’s most important growth priorities. The work will span commercial strategy, partner performance and lending product strategy, depending on where the biggest opportunities are. You will be expected to identify and structure problems yourself, lead the analysis and decide how You Lend should respond. You will then work across Product, Risk, Data, Operations, Capital Markets and Partnerships to ensure the recommendation is delivered.

This is initially a senior individual contributor role. You will work directly with You Lend’s leadership team and senior stakeholders at our largest partners, with the opportunity to build a team as the function grows.

• Setting priorities across a portfolio of high-value growth opportunities.
• Leading growth plans and performance turnarounds for major partners.
• Shaping lending initiatives across renewals, eligibility, offers, pricing and customer journeys.
• Building business cases for new products, markets and partnerships.
• Working through the trade-offs between growth, risk, margin, capital and customer experience.
• Leading initiatives from initial analysis through to implementation and measured impact.
• Presenting clear recommendations to You Lend’s leadership team and senior partner stakeholders.
• Improving how You Lend identifies, evaluates and delivers strategic initiatives.

• A major global partnership is growing more slowly than expected. What is holding it back, what could materially change its trajectory and how do we get both organisations behind the plan?
• A change to renewal timing, eligibility, pricing or repayment structure could unlock significant growth. How large is the opportunity, what are the risks and how should we test it?
• You Lend is considering investing in a new product or market. How attractive is the opportunity, what would need to be true for it to succeed and should we proceed?

• Experience solving difficult commercial or strategic problems, likely gained in consulting, strategy and operations, fintech, a founder’s office or another high-ownership role.
• Strong analytical skills, including SQL, Excel and commercial modelling. You should be comfortable getting into the data yourself.
• Good judgement across growth, pricing, risk, unit economics and customer experience.
• A track record of taking ambiguous problems from initial analysis through to implementation.
• Confidence working with senior leaders and external stakeholders.
• The ability to bring different teams together, challenge constructively and maintain pace through delivery.
• A self-directed working style and a willingness to take responsibility for outcomes.

Experience in fintech, lending, payments or embedded finance is helpful, but not required.

Within your first year, you will have led several initiatives with a material impact on growth, partner performance or You Lend’s lending proposition. You will be trusted by senior leadership to take on difficult, loosely defined problems and by teams across You Lend to provide clear direction and help get the work delivered.

As the strategy function grows, you will have the opportunity to build a team around the highest-value areas of work.

Why…