Senior Director, Risk and Underwriting (Payments/Fintech)

NMI

6d•$180,000 - $225,000•Remote

About The Position

NMI is a payments platform that underwrites and bears risk across both card acceptance and account-to-account products, including ACH, RTP, and FedNow. We oversee risk on roughly $1B in annual card volume and an $80B+ A2A program, moving funds through wholesale ISO distribution, ISV partnerships, and direct merchant relationships, with third-party sender activity through ODFI and sponsor bank arrangements. We are hiring a Senior Director of Risk and Underwriting to own this function end to end. This role combines strategic leadership with day-to-day operational accountability. The right person writes the risk frameworks and then runs them. They review the hard files personally, sit in the room for sponsor bank and network conversations, and stay close enough to the portfolio to catch problems before the bank does. This leader builds, decides, and executes every day. The mandate is enabling aggressive growth safely. The company is scaling merchant onboarding velocity, expanding payout volume, and adding banking infrastructure. Every one of those moves runs through this role. We need someone who finds thoughtful ways to say yes, treats risk appetite as a daily decision rather than an annual document, and sees disciplined risk management as a competitive advantage that lets the business move faster than its peers.

Requirements

Built or scaled a risk and underwriting function inside a regulated payments business: an acquirer, payfac, processor, or A2A platform.
Deep expertise in either card or ACH risk and fluency in the other.
Owned a sponsor bank or ODFI relationship as the accountable party, not as a participant.
Managed reserves, navigated examinations, and made underwriting calls on businesses where the answer was not obvious.
Eight or more years of relevant experience, or equivalent operational depth.
Ability to lead small senior teams and multiply them.
Ability to communicate risk simply to people who do not live in it, including executives, bankers, and salespeople.
Accountability for both portfolio outcomes and business growth, approaching risk decisions with the mindset of finding a responsible path to approval whenever the facts support it.
Direct ownership of merchant or A2A risk and underwriting in a payments or fintech environment.
Hands-on sponsor bank and ODFI accountability, not committee participation.
Fluency across fraud strategy, chargeback and reserve management, and AML, KYC, and KYB program governance.
Comfort with AI and automation-driven underwriting, and a bias toward building scalable systems over adding headcount.
Credibility with auditors, network partners, and executive leadership.

Nice To Haves

Slightly out of the ordinary career path or history.

Responsibilities

Underwriting policy and execution across the combined portfolio: card merchants, A2A clients, ISO and ISV sub-merchant populations, and high-velocity onboarding programs. This includes the mass onboarding and underwriting models that must support a step change in boarding velocity over the next two quarters.
Fraud monitoring, transaction monitoring alerts, ACH return-rate performance against NACHA thresholds, chargeback and dispute operations, and the KYC and KYB tooling stack, including vendor strategy across providers such as Verafin, Alloy, Middesk, and Socure alongside the card-side stack.
Reserve methodology and management, including reserve sizing, release decisions, and the financial exposure conversations that come with them.
Acting as the operating face of risk to financial institution partners, including principal-level credibility with sponsor banks and ODFIs, participation in new banking relationship buildouts, and exam and audit readiness across BSA and AML, OFAC, state money transmission licensing, and network compliance.
Partnering with the Compliance function, which sits within Legal, as a peer relationship.
Leading a defining integration project in the first year: reconciling two risk frameworks, two underwriting cultures, and two banking arrangements from a recent acquisition into one coherent program.