Area Credit Manager

AB Housing Finance Limited

Area Credit Manager

Location: Chennai - Sai Sagar, Tamil Nadu

Job Purpose

The purpose of this job is to execute risk and credit operations on assigned transactions in alignment with established frameworks and processes, ensuring effective and efficient loan underwriting across ABHFL service offerings for sound portfolio quality management. This role is expected to take approval decisions as per approval matrix after due creditworthiness and risk assessment ensuring process adherence, and coordinate with Sales, Operations and Technical team colleagues to ensure robust risk management operations.

Job Context & Major Challenges

Job Context/Job Challenges:

Key Aspects:

The Risk team provides core underwriting services fundamental to the ABHFL business health, risk management and sustainability. Structured as a dual to the Sales/ Sourcing team, with positions mapped against corresponding Sales roles across the organization, the Risk team is responsible for necessary controls and process checks to ensure business performance and health.

While the core responsibility for this function is to control the business via robust underwriting and risk management, supporting business expansion via joint evaluation of different product/ market growth proposals with the Sales team is also an important contribution.

The Head-Risk plays a vital role in securing the organization against diverse risks in the course of business operations. This role is responsible for setting up requisite underwriting and risk management frameworks and processes for robust and efficient creditworthiness and risk assessment, and consequent inputs for business decisions (loan approval/ rejection, business expansion, etc.)

Key Challenges:

While the ABFL Mortgages team also works with retail customers in the property space, the ABHFL business is exposed to the additional Construction Risk, i.e. risk from under construction projects not getting completed as planned. The Risk Team must factor for this when designing and executing control mechanisms and evaluating business proposals.

ABHFL is in its inception phase as a company and in the midst of rapid growth. The Risk function must therefore be able to balance priorities of risk management and business growth efficiently, without increasing sub-prime exposures or impacting business health and sustainability.

The housing space is characterized by state-wise norms and business practices, as well as varied interpretations of regulatory guidelines by different stakeholders. It is therefore essential for the Risk function to remain up to date on business practices/ norms across the country and work within regulatory guidelines in a manner that minimizes business risk and also supports growth objectives.

Enabling Skill Sets & Qualifications

Critical skill sets required to meet these challenges include strong business and commercial acumen, analytical skills, good stakeholder management and presentation skills, and team management and execution capabilities.

Education & experience required to fulfil this profile are a CA/ MBA-Finance with minimum 4-7 yrs of experience in a bank/ NBFC/ HFC, of which at least recent 2- 3 yrs experience should be in managing risk and underwriting in an HFC.

Key Result Areas

KRA (Accountabilities) (Max 1325 Characters)

Supporting Actions (Max 1325 Characters)

KRA1

Underwriting and Portfolio Quality Management

Execute risk and credit operations for assigned transactions in adherence with defined frameworks and principles across ABHFL business lines

Evaluate and approve proposals as per defined approval matrix, seeking guidance from seniors and assisting peers on specific cases as required

Liaise with relevant Legal, Technical and other verification vendors for Legal-Technical evaluations and clarifications in complex cases, as required

Monitor the bounce rates as per threshold limits.

KRA2

Process Efficiency

Execute risk operations efficiently and in a manner that enables business performance while ensuring risk management imperatives

Coordinate seamlessly with Credit Processing Analysts and Credit Analysts to ensure files are logged appropriately and analyzed thoroughly

Work as per process-driven coordination mechanisms with Sales and Operations teams for effective decision making and problem solving in line with business and risk management needs; escalate to RCM as required

Effectively managing external vendors to ensure quality of reports & TAT

Efficiently track Cost and ensure they are within budgeted levels.

Ensure accurate data capture in LOS and maintain high quality of documentation.

Ensure collection of Post disbursal documents within assigned time frame.

KRA3

Risk Compliance & Control

Ensure compliance with established risk management principles and norms; compile periodic and need based MIS, reports, escalation case documents, etc.

Conduct local risk operations in line with defined Maker-Checker mechanism with Sales and Operations teams in a systematic manner, across key aspects such as exception approvals, collateral valuation, PDD completion, cheque bounce collections, etc.

Ensure minimal critical observations in Audit and also to ensure all observations are resolved within specified TATs.

KRA4

Collection Efficiency

Work in alignment with process-driven mechanisms for coordination with the Collections/ Operations team on tracking delinquency cases and driving collections efficiently and effectively

Escalate specific/ complex cases, as required, to RCM for recovery and delinquency/ NPA avoidance

Monitoring of delinquent portfolios. Liaison with key delinquent customers and support collections team for resolutions of all cases

Report fraud cases to Risk monitoring team and Regional/Zonal Risk Head.

KRA5

Business Growth and Sustainability

Work in partnership with Sales and Operations colleagues on case-based decision making for effective support on business growth and sustainability

KRA6

Self-Development & Internal Stakeholder Coordination

Seek development to execute better risk assessment and loan underwriting via technical skill-up (e.g. proficiency on legal & technical documents, property business practices & norms, etc.) and role clarity

Maintain relationships with internal stakeholders for smooth coordination on complex/ escalation/ exception cases

Minimum Experience Level

6 - 10 years

Job Qualifications

Other Degree