Job description
Tala is seeking an experienced Recoveries leader to help us lead our growing operational team servicing customers in the East Africa region. Tala is a world leader in providing direct loans and financial services in emerging markets. We are a global team with diverse backgrounds who are singularly focused on using technology, data, and a customer-centric approach to meet the financial needs of the 2+ billion people of the emerging global middle class.
In this role, you will be responsible for managing on-site teams responsible for collections operations with direct accountability for recoveries performance, full cycle personnel management, quality of service, and budget management. You will be responsible for developing and implementing collections strategies, including tests, omni-channel collections, account segmentation, and new technologies. Additionally, you will have direct responsibility for hiring, performance management, scheduling, and incentive strategies. Finally, you will be responsible for developing and managing quality assurance programs, performance reporting, and continuous improvement projects.
Great candidates will have extensive experience leading collections/recoveries departments, ideally for a lender in the East Africa region, with strong analytical, organizational development/design, and hands-on operational management skills. You can and will roll up your sleeves to solve problems: you have a deep sense of accountability for (and demonstrated experience delivering) results as well as the success and growth of your teams. You have experience goal-setting and projecting growth, with a knack for cascading and communicating quantifiable, aggressive targets to your teams. Your teams and colleagues would describe you as an excellent communicator and decision-maker, adept at ensuring a large, varied audience understands issues, context, tradeoffs between different solutions, and reasons for decisions.
Responsibilities:
Manage several collections teams to Recovery Rate, Cure Rate, and QA (Quality Assurance) KPIs, with direct accountability for results.
Develop a team of supervisors that consistently lead teams to beat performance and quality targets using a data-first approach.
Manage hiring, staffing, scheduling, payroll, incentives and growth projections, within cost boundaries, collaborating closely with support teams (HR, IT, Finance).
Identify, prioritize, and implement collections tests and improvement strategies with team of analysts and supervisors.
Identify root cause of issues impacting collections results, communicate tradeoffs/risks for different solutions, and lead implementation of improvement programs.
Develop and report on KPI progress as well as indicators/inputs impacting performance
Evaluate performance of team members and provide guidance regarding development. Ensure your teams have the right skills, tools and talents to perform in their roles and develop within the organization.
Requirements:
Minimum 7 years of experience in Collections with at least 5 years of management experience above the supervisor level, preferably with a lender
Experience managing teams who are servicing the East Africa region and deep understanding of regional differences
Experience directly hiring and managing collectors and supervisory staff
Experience developing staffing and budget projections and collections compensation and incentive programs
Experience communicating with varied audiences: junior staff through executive
Deep experience assessing and utilizing operational and customer data to identify performance gaps, drive improvement, highlight opportunities for future growth, and make management decisions
Excel, SQL, or other business analytics tools experience
Comfort with ambiguity, a rapidly changing environment, and communicating assumptions & risks of decisions
Willingness to travel within region
Preferred:
Experience working in a startup environment
Experience with call center and telephony tech systems
Experience working with an international team
