Tala is seeking an experienced Recoveries leader to continue building out and lead our growing collections teams globally. 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 building and 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 successful execution 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 managing quality assurance programs, performance reporting, and continuous improvement projects.

Great candidates will have extensive experience leading collections/recoveries teams across multiple locations, with strong analytical, organizational development/design, and hands-on operational management skills. In addition to your collections background, you have a strong understanding of the financial services space, preferably in emerging markets. 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:

• Build and manage collections teams globally to meet Recovery Rate, Cure Rate, and QA (Quality Assurance) KPIs, with direct accountability for results.
• Manage hiring, staffing, scheduling, payroll, incentives and growth projections, within cost boundaries, collaborating closely with support teams (HR, IT, Finance).
• Successfully execute on collections tests and improvement strategies with team of analysts and managers
• Foster an environment that encourages employee participation, teamwork and communication
• Oversee, mentor and guide recoveries management in multiple locations who manage the day-to-day operations across functional teams.
• 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.
• Ensure employees and processes are compliant with all country laws and regulations.

Required Qualifications:

• Minimum 10 years of experience in Financial Services Operations Management with at least 5 years of management experience in Collections at the Director level or above
• Experience leading collections teams for high-volume unsecured consumer debt
• Experience managing operational teams in multiple locations, preferably multiple countries
• Experience having direct/indirect oversight of at least 300 employees
• 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, Looker, other business analytics tools experience
• Comfort with ambiguity, a rapidly changing environment, and communicating assumptions & risks of decisions
• Willingness to travel globally

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience working in a startup environment
• Experience with call center and telephony tech systems, including predictive dialer
• Experience working with international teams
• Experience with collections in emerging markets

We strongly believe that inclusion fosters innovation and we’re proud to have a diverse team with a wide variety of backgrounds and experiences. We focus on hiring talented people regardless of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

About Tala

Tala is a mission-driven mobile technology and data science company that’s opening up financial access for underserved people globally. Tala’s smartphone app uses alternative data to deliver instant credit and help customers build their financial identities. Unlike traditional credit scoring, Tala's proprietary underwriting models draw on thousands of mobile data points including network diversity, social connectedness, geographic patterns, and financial transactions to score customers in real time, without a need for formal credit history. Tala is headquartered in Santa Monica with additional offices in Nairobi and Manila.

Tala, formerly known as InVenture, is backed by IVP, Ribbit Capital, Lowercase Capital, Data Collective, Collaborative Fund and other leading venture and impact investors. In 2016, Fast Company ranked Tala as one of its top 10 companies in Money, and Forbes named Tala as one of the top 50 FinTech companies in the world. Additionally, Tala’s work has been highlighted by Forbes, the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, TED, and Wired, among others. Tala is headquartered in Los Angeles with additional offices in Nairobi and Manila.