Merchant Underwriter

OTT Pay is a professional financial technology and smart payment platform, which has recently completed its Series D funding. In order to accelerate the listing on NASDAQ, we are looking for industry experts to join us in some key positions.

OTT Pay provides high-quality one-stop services to nearly 10,000 merchants within Canada, including aggregated digital payment services, value-added marketing services, and e-commerce services through our platforms.

We are looking for a **Merchant Underwriter** to support our business growth. The Merchant Underwriter will join the Risk & Compliance Department, and reports to and gets direction from the Manager, Merchant Risk. The Merchant Underwriter will work with professionals in all departments to ensure compliance with policies and all necessary laws and regulations related to cards under the acquiring and issuing business model programs. You will also work with cross-functional teams such as Business Development, Compliance, Operations, Product, Technology, and Finance to deliver our business objectives in the following programs - Payment Facilitator Program; ISO Partner Program; Alternative Payment Methods’ acceptance such as WeChatPay, AliPay, Union Pay International; software and Apps for merchants to create, manage, and provide electronic loyalty cards, loyalty rewards, coupons, gift cards, discount cards, promotions gift card and loyalty programs.

This is a full-time, permanent position working out of our Leslie Street Head Office in North York.
- **What’s in it for you**:_
- Competitive salary
- Extended Health, Dental, and Vision Benefits
- Life and Disability Insurance
- Performance Bonus
- Paid Vacation Leaves
- Centrally located modern and spacious offices close to Eglinton and Leslie
- Free use of onsite Gym and Sports Facilities, and regular Company Social Events
- Learning and Professional Development Support
- A chance to work in a dynamic, collaborative, progressive and high performing team
- Community involvement through the annual Terry Fox Run
- Tremendous opportunities for Growth and Development
- **How you will contribute**:_
- Implement and execute all the elements of the merchant underwriting framework with a view to mitigating risks imposed by merchants to OTT.
- Maintain and update underwriting procedures and ensure that they are in line with the OTT Underwriting Policy.
- Recommend Policy amendments where required. Submit revised Policy for management approval.
- Evaluate risk & compliance activities and irregularities related to Underwriting; update, recommend and help to enforce policy.
- Maintain records of risk & compliance activities, gaps and corrective action plans.
- Remain abreast with risk management standards, regulations and card scheme changes in order to implement effective merchant risk mitigation controls.
- Collaborate with business development, finance, marketing and other operational support functions to define acceptable underwriting risk thresholds.
- Work closely with cross functional operational and IT teams to continuously upgrade, document and deploy merchant risk related system processes and regulatory and card scheme rule changes.
- Implements and monitors risk mitigation strategies across the entire merchant onboarding and management lifecycle process in order to reduce any adverse exposure originating at any stage of the relationship.
- Prepare Underwriting checklists using risk factor weightings, continuously recommending adjustments where needed.
- Writes and submits requests for information between the company and the merchant, ensuring that the communication is professional and represents the Company and ensures that responses are adequate.
- Responsibilities at both onboarding and ongoing review stages:

- Verify that Merchants are PCI-DSS compliant.
- Conduct assessment of merchant's history of chargeback and refund ratios, transaction volumes, average ticket size, delivery risk.
- Conduct website content/URL or review third-party vendor's results.
- Conduct credit and financial risk assessment for merchants.
- Conduct reserves risk assessment and provides reserves rate to be applied and document the decision rationale.
- Conduct risk assessment of merchants commensurate with its line of business or industry sector, type of medium used to sell its products or services, credit and financial risk, length of time in business, payment method accepted, along with other criteria used to assess the merchant.
- Evaluate merchants by risk level ensuring that a scoring level of assessment is completed for merchants of different risk levels, i.e., complete a higher level of due diligence for a higher risk merchant.
- Recommends exception-based approvals in accordance with policy, recording the risks involved to approve or to decline the exceptions.
- Ensure that all known risks are included in the risk assessments of merchants and continuously updated with new risks found.
- Implements and monitors fraud and r