Underwriting Specialist

Helcim is searching for a talented and passionate Underwriting Specialist to join us on our mission to become the world’s most loved payments company.

As our Underwriting Specialist, you will focus on refining our credit risk frameworks, processes and guidelines with the goal of minimizing our exposures associated with both new customer onboarding as well as ongoing monitoring/rolling underwriting with our established customers. The challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to help us develop the aforementioned underwriting framework that manages our credit risk at scale while preserving a quality, human focused experience that encourages our customers to grow with us.

This is an exciting opportunity to become an integral part of the risk management team at a high-growth fintech company changing the payments landscape. You will use your knowledge of SMB commercial underwriting to help inform our credit decisions, build our credit processes, and work with our talented developers to create underwriting models for machine based decision making. You’ll help with account underwriting reviews and create workflows that guide our Trust and Safety team through credit risk mitigation processes in their day-to-day work.

In this role you will meld your commercial credit/underwriting expertise with real world processes to help us create and run an efficient, seamless, precise financial risk mitigation programme that encourages customer growth while reducing our risk.

**What You'll Do**
- Create and iterate credit underwriting models for new customer onboarding as well as rolling underwriting for established customers.
- Oversee and conduct day to day customer underwriting reviews, including review of financial statements, credit reports and corporate entity registrations.
- Develop and iterate Trust and Safety team guidance/workflows for working through credit risk events.
- Devise a list of tools for navigating credit/underwriting inquiries with at-risk customers.
- Adjust underwriting models to reflect trends in our processing activity and real world events that could impact the financial health of our customers and mitigate our exposure to those risks.
- Establish close relationships and work with key internal and external partners across product, software development, machine learning, business teams and third party suppliers (data and credit bureaus) to develop strategies for improving and iterating how we manage credit risk.
- Help develop long term plans and a strategy for mitigation of financial risk across our full suite of current and future products.
- Monitor and ensure compliance with organizational, business, strategic, operational, legal, reputation and market risks where applicable.

**You are someone who**:

- Is obsessed with staying one step ahead in a continuously changing and ambiguous risk environment.
- Curates a broad (local, national, global) financial perspective with a keen desire to relate it back to our credit risk mitigation operations.
- Is a creative thinker who considers problems from a customer perspective while being pragmatic and solutions oriented when solving them.
- Loves using data to solve complicated puzzles.Has considerable empathy for our customers - typically small and medium business owners - who will take a human-centric approach to help solve problems.
- Self-starter that thrives in fast-paced environment.
- Can use systems thinking to create a unified risk framework alongside our Fraud and Compliance teams.

**Qualifications**
- Experience and knowledge of commercial credit best practices and tools (including data/credit bureau products) for both business entity verification and credit underwriting management, with a proven ability to distill into repeatable, scalable processes.
- An excellent, values-driven decision maker, with strong experience in SMB credit underwriting, financial risk modeling and cash flow forecasting.
- The ability to transform business and financial data into a cohesive narrative that outlines potential credit risks and presents dynamic mitigation strategies.
- Strong knowledge of accounting principles and comfort with evaluating financial statements and business models across a range of industries.
- Excellent communication skills, both written and oral, combined with strong interpersonal skills.
- Adept at distilling complicated concepts into understandable workflows and coaching teammates in their use.
- Strong time-management and organizational skills.
- Experience in payments is an asset but not required - if you’re a whiz in SMB credit, we can teach payments.

**Why Helcim?**

Helcim is a payments company that gives small and medium sized businesses a better way to accept debit and credit cards. Thousands of merchants across Canada and the US choose Helcim for their payment needs because of our excellent customer service and innovative software solutions. We won the Canada’s Most Admired Award for Corporate Culture in 2021, ra