Head of Lending Operations

About the role

A financial technology firm building a lending platform is hiring a Head of Lending Operations in Lagos. The role is not a traditional loan operations position: it is about designing scalable systems, optimizing processes and building the operational infrastructure needed to support significant growth. The Head of Lending Operations designs, manages and continuously improves the end-to-end lending operations lifecycle, creating scalable workflows, reducing friction and strengthening controls so that transaction volumes can grow without proportional increases in headcount or cost.

Key responsibilities

• Oversee the complete lending operations lifecycle: customer onboarding, verification and identity validation, loan processing and documentation, disbursement, repayment monitoring, collections coordination, reconciliation, customer support and exception management.
• Design and improve end-to-end workflows through process mapping, standardize operating procedures and implement SLAs and performance monitoring frameworks.
• Integrate client platforms with banks, mobile money providers and payroll systems, and identify manual processes suitable for automation.
• Design operational controls that reduce fraud and operational risk, and set up rule-based workflows for exceptions.
• Analyze how operations actually work, find root causes of recurring issues and turn repetitive exceptions into standardized processes.

Required profile

• Experience managing operations in lending, fintech, banking, payments, insurance, telecommunications, logistics, marketplaces or other high-volume environments.
• Demonstrated success improving, redesigning, automating or scaling operational processes.
• Ideal candidate naturally looks for ways to automate manual work, thinks in systems, focuses on root causes and balances customer experience with risk management.

Required skills

• Process mapping and business process re-engineering
• Workflow optimization, operational controls and performance measurement
• Risk and fraud control frameworks
• Data-driven decision making and cross-functional stakeholder management