SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Pennylane is a high-growth fintech serving over 1.5 million SMEs and 7,000 accounting firms across France. The company has raised €400M from top-tier investors including Sequoia and is expanding into regulated financial services. As part of this expansion, Pennylane is building its own licensed financing entity (Établissement de paiement and Société de financement) to scale its own-book financing activity beyond its current BaaS model.
You will join as Credit Operations Lead, reporting to the Managing Director, to build and launch the first-line credit operations function for Pennylane's new financing entity. This is a greenfield role with high autonomy at the core of the company's licensed operations strategy.
Key Responsibilities:
- Own end-to-end credit origination execution, including manual reviews, delegated first-line decisions, exception handling and escalation to Risk. Ensure outcomes meet SLAs and maintain complete audit trails.
- Build the credit operating model from scratch: procedures, decision trees, delegated authorities, first-line controls, operational KPIs and escalation paths.
- Manage first-line portfolio monitoring of the active book, tracking repayment incidents, early-warning signals and required follow-up actions per credit policy.
- Establish the operational relationship with the financing partner, defining clear responsibilities, service levels and escalation processes.
- Provide Risk with structured feedback on policy effectiveness, operational impact and emerging portfolio signals.
- Partner with Product, Tech, Risk and Data teams to design origination workflows, analyst tools and scoring processes; translate operational needs into product requirements.
- Remain hands-on during launch, then recruit and lead the first credit analysts as volumes scale, establishing quality standards and a culture of rigor and accountability.
First 6–12 Months:
- Deliver an approved end-to-end operating model covering procedures, decision trees, delegated authorities, evidence requirements and escalation paths.
- Ensure origination workflow is operationally ready by testing decision paths and failure scenarios with Product and Tech.
- Establish management framework: SLAs, quality controls, operational KPIs, portfolio-monitoring indicators and Risk reporting.
- Ensure every credit decision is reconstructible from underlying data, evidence, policy and recorded approvals.
- Define capacity model, team coverage and hiring plan based on expected volumes and performance.
- By go-live, have trained operational coverage, named escalation owners and documented procedures.
Requirements:
- Significant experience in credit or underwriting operations within a regulated financial-services environment, including manual reviews, delegated decisions, exceptions and audit trails.
- Experience managing operational quality, SLAs and capacity, with direct team leadership or strong player-coach track record.
- Strong understanding of first-line credit operations and the respective responsibilities of Operations and Risk.
- Experience collaborating with Product or Tech teams on workflows, tooling and automation.
- Ability to use operational and portfolio indicators to identify early-warning signals, manage performance and plan capacity.
- Sound judgment on what to automate, what requires human review and when to escalate.
- Ability to make structured, well-documented decisions and communicate clearly to customers, partners and internal stakeholders.
- Experience with SME financing products (invoice financing, short-term working-capital facilities) is a strong advantage.
- Fluent French and English (mandatory).
- Based in France with strong preference for Paris; regular on-site presence expected (partial remote possible, not fully remote).
