Head of Credit Products and Analytics

ABOUT  RENEW CAPITAL

Renew Capital is building a new way to bank Africa's missing middle.

We are a pan-Africa investment firm with a presence in 13 countries. We back the bold founders using technology to pursue Africa's greatest opportunities, and with more than a decade of investing on the continent, we are among the most active investors building Africa's thriving private sector.

Now we are building the next layer. We believe embedded finance will become the dominant way Africa's small businesses get banked, and that the companies best placed to deliver it are the technology platforms those businesses already use every day. We are building a pan-African, scalable lending infrastructure underneath our portfolio of technology companies first. Then we will open it to companies outside our portfolio. The goal is to become Africa's largest bank by number of businesses served.

We are looking for visionaries and builders: people who can see where this is going and will roll up their sleeves to build it - fast, smart and with modern technology.

ROLE SUMMARY

Location: Africa

Renew Capital is seeking aHead of Credit Products and Analytics to own the lending products function of our business end-to-end. Renew Capital’s lending and investment function operates across four core functions: investing, lending, technology and portfolio management.

In this role, you will lead the design, development, deployment and ongoing management of our credit products across African markets, holding direct accountability for their commercial success and portfolio health. Specifically, you will tailor lending products to the sectors and markets served by our portfolio companies, evaluate and originate loans directly to these businesses or embedded through them to their customers and manage the health of the loan books.

This is a hands-on, execution-oriented position. Initially, you will build the credit scoring models, write the credit policies and manage the loan book personally using tools built and supported by Renew Capital's internal technology team. Over time, with success, you will build and lead a dedicated credit team.

This role reports directly to the Director of Lending (who holds final approval on credit strategy and policy alongside the Investment Committee).

RESPONSIBILITIES

Product

• Develop and structure specialized lending products segmented by economic sector and enterprise scale (nano, micro, small and medium enterprises). Define the explicit borrower profiles, maximum loan limits, interest rates, and loan tenors for each segment
• Design flexible repayment structures that mirror the actual cash flows of underlying businesses, ranging from weekly trade cycles to seasonal agricultural harvests, rather than forcing a single rigid structure on every borrower.
• Establish a disciplined, market-by-market launch sequence, thoroughly proving and refining a credit product in one market before extending it to the next.
• Design an integrated verification layer that combines algorithmic scoring with the on-the-ground relationship insights our portfolio companies maintain with their customers, allowing the underwriting model to benefit directly from localized partner visibility.

Deployment

• Assess portfolio and pipeline companies for lending readiness: whether the company holds engineered financial data, whether it is good enough to underwrite against and what it would take to get there.
• Build and maintain the credit scoring models that turn portfolio company data into underwriting decisions, starting with a base model that adapts by market and sector, and take the first cohort from rules-based decisioning to a statistically validated model as repayment data accrues.
• Define precise data engineering requirements for the technology team to ensure partner platform data seamlessly ingests into a standardized credit feature set.
• Originate loans to written credit standards and collaborate with the CFO to execute disbursement workflows.
• Advise, coach and support portfolio founders to strengthen their data management systems, ensuring their companies generate high-quality SME data required for advanced credit modeling and business scale.

Management

• Manage the loan book, including weekly monitoring of debt quality, arrears, vintage performance, provisioning coverage and early warning signals.
• Own progression down the maturity curve. Set clear non-performing loan (NPL) targets, track losses cohort by cohort and continuously refine underwriting models and policies until launch-stage losses stabilize.
• Own the collections and restructuring framework and act early when a book starts to deteriorate.
• Report loan book performance to leadership and to the portfolio management function, and support investor reporting on credit quality.
• Manage mandatory credit bureau submissions and regulatory reporting compliance across all operating jurisdictions.

Preferred Qualifications

• Degree in a quantitative field such as mathematics, statistics, actuarial science, computer science or economics. Advanced degree a plus.
• 8+ years in credit and lending in Africa, including several years at a digital or fintech lender.
• Deep experience in SME, MSME or nano lending in African markets, including thin-file and no-bureau environments.
• Hands-on track record building production credit scoring models on alternative data such as SMS, mobile money, transaction and platform data, using Python, SQL and methods such as logistic regression and gradient boosting.
• Experience owning a loan book through full lending cycles, including pricing, limits, tenor, limit graduation, collections, restructuring and provisioning. IFRS 9 exposure is a plus.
• Experience writing credit policy, setting risk appetite and recommending changes to a credit committee or executive team.
• Experience working across more than one African market and its regulatory and data compliance regime. Direct engagement with regulators or credit bureaus is a plus.
• Comfortable sitting between technology, data engineering, product and finance and specifying what each needs to build.
• Familiarity with modern loan management and core banking systems such as Fineract, Mambu or similar.
• Strong communicator able to translate credit models into business outcomes for founders, leadership and investors.
  

Why Join

This role is at the heart of Renew Capital’s investment strategy: building the next generation of data-driven infrastructure for Africa’s private sector. You’ll shape how SMEs access capital and design proprietary technology with global relevance.

More About Renew Capital:

We invite you to learn more about Renew Capital by visiting our website:www.renewcapital.com. 

Renew Capital is an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, veteran or disability status, or any other basis prohibited by law. Further, Renew Capital supports gender-based pay equity and is committed to compensating women and men equally, for equal work.