Senior Specialist Business Strategy

Business Unit:  Chief Credit Office
Salary range: £44,000 - £55,000 per annum DOE + red-hot benefits
Location:  UK Remote
Contract type: Permanent

Don’t settle for dull. Live a life more Virgin.

Our Team

Our Business Credit Risk team plays a pivotal role in shaping our lending strategy across Business lending. We're looking for a Senior Specialist to join our team and help us innovate and continue to grow responsibly while ensuring our lending meets customer needs and regulatory standards.

What you’ll be doing

• Leading the development and implementation of innovative business credit strategies to support Virgin Money’s growth ambitions through sustainable lending practices, whilst ensuring growth remains within our risk appetite framework.
• Continuous optimisation of all onboarding and credit strategies and criteria for new and existing customers to stay ahead of the competition, responding to changing regulatory landscape.
• Leverage technology and new data sources to streamline lending processes and provide insight into the business lending portfolios, driving efficiency across the business.
• Working closely with internal stakeholders such as Credit Modelling, Commercial, and Technology to ensure ideas and solutions are driven to tangible outcomes.
• Providing coherent and actionable insight, oversight, and challenge of the credit strategies within the business bank to a variety of internal and external stakeholders, including senior committees.
• Own creation of work requests to reflect approved business requirements required by systems teams and provide effective challenge and engagement with systems and change teams as well as operations to ensure safe execution of strategies.
• Drive a culture of continuous improvement, rationalising processes, improving sophistication and addressing complexity across all aspects of the credit risk lifecycle.
• As required, provide deputising support for the Credit Risk Manager, supporting all aspects of managing business lending strategies.

We need you to have

• Previous experience within a credit risk environment, with strong technical expertise in SAS, Python, R, SQL or other data management tools used for conducting portfolio analytics.
• Understanding around creating best in class automated lending strategies, driving continuous improvements to optimise the credit risk decisions and deliver safe and sustainable automation to the business
• Extensive experience in articulating complex credit risk matters into digestible and actionable insight, with an ability to land a succinct message with senior leaders.
• Proficient attention to detail, ensuring analytics produced is accurate and robust.
• Insatiable curiosity and an inquisitive mindset with a drive to delve past surface level information and understand trends from first principles.
• Significant experience in influencing change in a positive and collaborative manner and turn ideas into practical solutions.
• Experience in building trusted relationships with key stakeholders, both internally and externally.

It’s a bonus if you have but not essential

• Knowledge of business lending within an IRB credit environment.
• Experience across business credit risk modelling and analytics.
• Broad knowledge of Risk Management disciplines and three lines of defence model in place across the Group.

Red Hot Rewards

• Generous holidays - 38.5 days annual leave (including bank holidays and prorated if part-time)​ plus the option to buy more.
• Up to five extra paid well-being days per year​. 
• 20 weeks paid, gender-neutral family leave (52 weeks in total) for expectant parents and those looking to adopt. 
• Market-leading pension.
• Free private medical cover, income protection and life assurance.
• Flexible benefits include Cycle to Work, wellness and health assessments, and critical illness. 

And there's no waiting around, you'll enjoy these benefits from day one.

Feeling insatiably curious about this role? If we’re lucky to receive a lot of interest, we may close the advert early and would hate you to miss out.

We're all about helping you Live a Life More Virgin, so happy to talk flexible working with you.

Say hello to Virgin Money
We’re making great strides towards achieving our ambition of becoming the UK’s best digital bank.  As a full-service digital bank with a heritage stretching back over 180 years, we’re a workforce to be reckoned with, and we're putting the full power of our experience behind disruptive ideas that reinvent the role a bank plays in people's lives. We're customer-obsessed and work tirelessly to deliver on our purpose, ‘Making You Happier About Money.’ This means we're able to do banking differently, and by innovating and working together we can make a real difference by creating memorable moments and red-hot experiences for our millions of customers. Join us and Live a Life More Virgin that empowers you with choice and flexibility in how you work. 

Be yourself at Virgin Money
Our purpose is to make people happier about money, this means seeing and feeling the world as our customers do by creating a workforce that reflects the rich diversity of our customers and communities.  We’re committed to creating an inclusive culture where colleagues feel safe and inspired to contribute, speak up and be heard.  

As a Disability Confident Leader, we're committed to removing any obstacles to inclusion.  If you need any reasonable adjustments or support making your application, contact our Talent Acquisition team careers@virginmoney.com

It’s important to note that there may be occasions where it’s not possible to interview all candidates declaring a disability who meet the essential criteria for the job. In certain recruitment situations such as receiving a high-volume of applications, we may need to limit the overall numbers of interviews offered to both disabled and non-disabled applicants. 

Now the legal bit
Living A Life More Virgin allows our colleagues to be based anywhere in the UK (if the role allows it), but we'll need you to confirm you have the right to work in the UK.

If you're successful in securing a role with us, there are some checks you need to complete before starting. These include credit and criminal record checks and three years' worth of satisfactory references. If the role is part of the Senior Manager Regime and Certification Regime, it requires enhanced pre-employment checks – we'll ask for six years of regulatory references, and once in the role, you'll be subject to periodic employment checks.