In 1910, a Norfolk lawyer named Arthur Morris kept seeing the same thing: a steadily employed worker needed a small loan, the banks turned him away for lack of collateral, and he was left with nowhere reputable to borrow. Morris decided a banking system that shut out most of the people it was meant to serve had a "weak spot" worth fixing, so he built a lender that lent on character and steady income, backed by two references and repaid in small installments. What made it matter wasn't any single loan, but that Morris turned the idea into a repeatable system and scaled it to more than a hundred Morris Plan banks across thirty-seven states.
A century later, the hard part is unchanged: making one good loan is easy; building a business that makes millions of them well is hard. Mercury is building a banking*-grade lending business, where credit extends the trust businesses already place in us to hold and move their money. We need a leader to turn that foundation into a thriving, responsibly-scaled business.
Were looking for a Head of Product to own Mercury's lending business end-to-end: defining product strategy, leading a team of product managers and lending specialists, driving growth, and ultimately owning business performance and P&L outcomes. You will work closely with credit, sales and finance to grow originations while maintaining healthy approval rates, repayment performance, and loss outcomes.
*Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and Column N.A., Members FDIC.
Key responsibilities
- Own the business lending P&L and strategy: Set the multi-year strategy - which products to build, which segments to serve, how to grow originations against economic and credit targets. Own the numbers.
- Build and scale the lending org: Recruit, develop, and lead a high-performing PM team,strong product build discipline, develop future leaders, and establish the operating cadence and culture that allow a lending business to move quickly without sacrificing rigor.
- Take products from 0-1 to scale: Launch and grow Mercury's lending products - term loans, lines of credit, and what comes next, and build the experimentation loop that compounds growth post-launch.
- Partner with credit, underwriting, and risk on credit policy, underwriting models, and eligibility.
- Manage capital and lending partners: Work with finance, capital markets, and banking/lending partners to keep the business well-capitalized and structured to scale, and own those relationships.
- Balance growth with rigor: Build a lending business that customers love while meeting the credit, risk, and compliance standards a regulated product demands making the hard tradeoffs between speed, experience, and controls.
- Align the lending ecosystem: Bring together product, engineering, underwriting, risk, credit operations, data, compliance, legal, marketing, sales, support, and external partners to execute a cohesive lending strategy and deliver strong business outcomes.
Some things that might make you successful in a role like this:
- We're looking for a leader who has built and scaled a business lending organization, with great product chops, the commercial instinct to grow it and the credit discipline to grow it responsibly, equally credible on portfolio economics with finance, credit policy with underwriting, and product strategy with engineering.
- 10+ years in lending or credit products, including significant time in SMB, commercial, or business lending, with experience building and running teams.
- 5+ years leading and managing teams of product managers, including hiring, coaching, organizational design, and performance management.
- Deep command of the full lending lifecycle: eligibility, application, underwriting and decisioning, funding, servicing, repayment, and collections and the credit, risk, and compliance considerations at each stage.
- A track record of owning a lending P&L and its levers: pricing, credit policy, capital structure, loss performance, and unit economics.
- Experience launching and scaling 0-1 lending or credit products, ideally in a fintech or high-growth environment.
- Experience working directly with bank partners, lending partners, or capital markets to structure and fund a lending business.
- Sound judgment in a regulated, risk-sensitive environment: you balance a delightful customer experience with the controls a credit product requires.
- A >#LI-MF1
