Credit Manager — Origination & Portfolio Growth

Pesapal is seeking a commercially driven Credit Manager to grow our merchant lending book. This is a growth and origination role, not a back-office control role: your job is to convert Pesapal's proprietary transaction data and credit scores into more merchants borrowing, borrowing more, and borrowing again — safely. We already sit on a rich data ecosystem of POS flows, e-commerce volumes, reservation data and digital spend, and a large number of merchants are creditworthy today and simply not borrowing. You will own that gap.

• Own the Growth Number: Carry the disbursement, active borrower and outstanding loan book (OLB) targets for your markets and segments, across all partner lending programmes.
• Build the Origination Engine: Design and run the end-to-end funnel — from identifying eligible merchants in the pre-scored base through offer, application, partner approval and disbursement — and lift conversion at every step.
• Activate the Dormant Base: Systematically work the population of merchants who already qualify but have never drawn down, and diagnose why they don't.
• Drive Repeat & Deepening: Grow repeat borrowing, top-ups, limit utilisation and graduated limit increases, and run pre-approved offers and seasonal working-capital campaigns with Marketing, Product and the relevant partner.
• Enable the Frontline: Equip Sales, Relationship and Merchant Success teams to position credit confidently — talk tracks, eligibility rules, objection handling and referral routes.

• Own the Commercial Relationship: Act as Pesapal's day-to-day counterpart to our lending partners, running the joint pipeline, performance reviews and the working relationship at credit and product level.
• Negotiate & Expand Appetite: Use portfolio evidence to secure larger allocations, higher limits, broader eligibility criteria, better pricing and faster decisioning.
• Keep the Joint Machinery Running: Work with Credit Operations, Finance and the partner on data exchange, decisioning integration, disbursement and repayment flows, reconciliation and revenue share, escalating blockages before they cost volume.
• Report with Credibility: Own the portfolio narrative our partners see — vintage performance, funnel metrics, NPL and recovery trends — so Pesapal is consistently the partner they want to allocate more capital to.

• Turn Judgement Into Rules: Translate what you learn originating in the market — merchant behaviour, decline patterns, repayment signals, exception cases — into credit policy expressed as decision rules, eligibility criteria, and limit and pricing logic.
• Own the Credit Strategy in the Decision Engine: Define and continuously refine the cut-offs, scorecard bands, limit-assignment and step-up rules that govern automated decisions, working with Product, Engineering and Data Science to get them built and released.
• Raise Straight-Through Processing: Grow the share of merchants who receive an instant, fully automated decision, and treat every recurring manual exception as the specification for the next platform rule — so volume grows without growing the credit team.
• Commercialise the Score: Work with the Lead Data Scientist to turn model output into commercial decisions — who receives an offer, how large, at what price, over what tenor — and run champion/challenger tests that quantify volume gained against risk taken.
• Close the Feedback Loop: Feed origination intelligence — partner decline reasons, funnel drop-off points, thin-file and underserved segments — back into scoring and policy, and monitor the vintage performance of the cohorts you write.

• Assess & Recommend: Make sound credit decisions within delegated limits, and prepare well-argued cases for exposures above your threshold or requiring partner sign-off.
• Shape Policy With Evidence: Recommend changes to credit policy, limits and eligibility criteria — internally and with partners — supported by portfolio data, knowing when to loosen to capture safe share and when to tighten.
• Respect the Firewalls: Grow the book within the approved risk appetite of Pesapal and each partner, maintaining clear separation between origination, underwriting and collections.
• Work Across Functions: Partner with Credit Operations on clean handover and fast disbursement, Data Science on model design and rollout, Collections on early-warning feedback, and Finance and Compliance on pricing, revenue share, provisioning, Central Bank requirements, data protection and AML/KYC.

• Experience: 3–6 years in credit, SME or commercial lending, digital lending or credit analytics, with a clear record of growing a loan book rather than only managing or monitoring one — evidenced by volumes disbursed, borrowers acquired, book grown or conversion improved.
• Partnership Exposure: Experience working across institutional counterparties — banks, DCPs, microfinance institutions, fintech partners or funders — and comfort holding a commercial relationship with a lender rather than simply reporting to one.
• Credit & Systems Fundamentals: Ability to assess an MSME, size a limit sensibly and defend a decision to a partner credit committee, together with experience translating credit policy into the rules, criteria and limit logic that a decision engine or loan origination platform executes.
• Data Fluency: Comfort interrogating dashboards and working with scorecard output, preferably with the ability to write your own SQL queries or build your own analysis in Excel.
• Market Knowledge: Deep familiarity with the Kenyan MSME and merchant ecosystem and how DCPs and banks in this market think about credit. Experience in a digital lender, fintech or a bank's MSME / cash-flow lending unit, and exposure to alternative-data underwriting, is highly desirable.

• Commercial Drive With Credit Discipline: You chase growth, but you understand that a book grown badly is worse than no growth at all — and that a partner's trust, once lost, is expensive to rebuild.
• Data-Driven Credit Mindset: You accept that a merchant's daily POS consistency can tell you more than a three-year audited financial statement, and you can prove it to a sceptical bank.
• Influence Without Authority: You get results through peers in Operations, Data Science, Collections and Sales, and through partner institutions, without managing any of them.
• Systems Thinker, Not a Deal Doer: When you solve a credit problem once, your instinct is to make sure the platform solves it every time after that.
• Bias to Experiment: You would rather run a controlled pilot on 200 merchants this month than write a strategy paper about it, and you understand what an MSME actually needs working capital for, and when.

• Loan Book Growth: Value disbursed and outstanding loan book against target, across all partner programmes.
• Take-Up & Conversion: Proportion of eligible merchants who accept and draw down, funnel conversion at each stage including partner approval, and growth in active borrowers, repeat borrowing and limit utilisation.
• Partnership Performance: Funding capacity secured and utilised, expansion of partner appetite and eligibility, and successful onboarding of new lending partners.
• Quality of Originated Business: First-payment default and vintage NPL on the cohorts you write, within budgeted and partner-agreed boundaries.
• Automation & Speed: Straight-through processing and automated approval rates, reduction in applications needing manual review, and time from eligibility to disbursement.

Revenue and net margin Pesapal earns from the portfolio you originate.