Senior Director of Underwriting, Fraud Monitoring & Boarding

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Senior Director of Underwriting, Fraud Monitoring & Boarding based in the United States. This senior leadership role will own the operational backbone of merchant boarding, underwriting, fraud monitoring, and portfolio risk management for a rapidly scaling B2B payments platform. You will lead teams and modernize risk operations through automation, analytics, and practical AI-enabled decisioning. The role combines hands-on operational leadership with strategic influence across Product, Engineering, Compliance, Finance, Sales, and banking partners. You will help create faster, more consistent onboarding experiences while maintaining rigorous controls for higher-risk customers. A major focus will be turning payments, transaction, and accounts receivable data into actionable underwriting and monitoring signals. You will also help shape the operating model for future embedded lending capabilities. Success will be measured through stronger risk governance, improved decision speed, scalable processes, and disciplined portfolio performance. Lead and scale teams across merchant underwriting, boarding operations, risk analytics, fraud monitoring, and portfolio risk, establishing clear performance expectations, coaching, and development plans. Own day-to-day merchant boarding and underwriting operations across payments and future lending applications, ensuring efficient, consistent, and controlled execution. Redesign onboarding and underwriting workflows around intelligent automation and AI-assisted decisioning, enabling straight-through processing for low-risk applications while routing complex cases to appropriate human reviewers. Define and operationalize risk appetite, credit policies, exposure limits, approval authorities, escalation thresholds, and exception-management processes across merchant segments. Establish effective risk governance routines, including delegated authority workflows, exception reviews, quality controls, and recurring reporting for senior leadership and sponsor bank stakeholders. Partner with Product, Engineering, Compliance, Finance, and external vendors to modernize KYB/KYC, beneficial ownership, sanctions screening, fraud detection, bank-data connectivity, transaction monitoring, and decision orchestration capabilities. Implement automated document-review and decision-support capabilities while ensuring automated outputs remain explainable, auditable, reviewable, and subject to appropriate human oversight. Contribute to the design of future embedded lending operations, including application intake, underwriting policies, documentation requirements, exposure and line-assignment inputs, exception handling, servicing controls, and loss mitigation. Partner with Finance and senior leadership on portfolio performance, loss forecasting, vintage analysis, reserve modeling, pricing inputs, and the economics of future lending products. Own ongoing merchant risk monitoring, including transaction surveillance, chargebacks, returns, ACH trends, behavioral anomalies, fraud indicators, and early signs of credit deterioration. Develop executive and sponsor-bank dashboards covering merchant exposure, fraud, losses, exceptions, chargebacks, returns, and other critical risk indicators. Establish and lead response protocols for significant events such as fraud rings, processor issues, funding disputes, NSF activity, and breaches of merchant agreements. Maintain compliance with applicable NACHA, BSA/AML, OFAC, card-network, state lending, and sponsor-bank requirements across U.S. and Canadian operations. Serve as a key operational contact for sponsor banks and processors during audits, file reviews, exception requests, policy discussions, and regulatory or compliance activities. Translate risk strategy into measurable KPIs and SLAs, including time-to-decision, approval rates, fraud basis points, loss