Product Manager: Credit Risk & Fraud

Product Manager: Credit Risk & Fraud
Location: Cape Town (hybrid, in office Tuesday to Thursday)
Type: Permanent
Experience: 5+ years

About the role
We’re working with a fast-growing fintech building scalable, customer-centric financial products. Their credit risk and fraud platforms are central to protecting customers and the business while enabling responsible lending at scale, and they’re looking for a Product Manager to own and drive the roadmap for Credit Risk & Fraud.
The role focuses on how the business assesses creditworthiness, detects and prevents fraud, automates decisioning, and continuously improves model and policy performance, all while balancing risk appetite with customer experience. You’ll lead product strategy and delivery across credit decisioning, fraud detection and prevention, identity verification, and risk operations tooling, with a strong bias toward measurable impact: reduced losses, faster decisioning, better approval rates, and lower fraud rates.
You’ll work closely with engineering, data science, risk, compliance, operations, and commercial teams.

What you’ll do
• Own the product vision and roadmap for credit risk and fraud
• Define clear product outcomes aligned to business goals like portfolio quality, fraud loss reduction, decisioning speed, and regulatory compliance
• Identify and prioritize opportunities across credit scoring, policy automation, fraud signals, and identity verification
• Build deep understanding of the credit lifecycle, fraud typologies, and the operational constraints shaping risk decisions
• Work with data science and risk teams to understand model performance, policy gaps, and emerging fraud patterns
• Use data to find root causes of fraud losses, bad debt, manual review bottlenecks, and false positive rates
• Lead cross-functional delivery squads from problem definition through launch and optimization
• Produce high-quality product briefs, PRDs, and outcome-focused backlogs
• Partner with engineering and data science to design scalable, secure, explainable solutions
• Manage dependencies across internal platforms, data vendors, bureau integrations, and compliance
• Act as the primary product partner for risk, fraud, collections, and compliance leadership
• Communicate trade-offs, progress, and impact clearly to senior stakeholders
• Define and track success metrics: credit loss and arrears, fraud detection and false positive rates, straight-through processing and auto-decisioning rates, approval/decline rates by segment, manual review volumes, time-to-decision, and drop-off

What you’ll bring
• 5+ years as a Product Manager in complex, data-intensive environments
• A proven track record owning and delivering outcomes in risk, fraud, or financial services product areas
• Experience with credit decisioning systems, fraud detection platforms, identity verification tools, or bureau integrations
• Comfort in regulated environments; fintech or consumer lending experience is a strong advantage
• Familiarity with machine learning model deployment, policy rule engines, or decisioning infrastructure is highly desirable
• A strong analytical thinker who turns complex risk data into clear product direction
• Excellent prioritization, with a focus on risk-adjusted business and customer outcomes
• A data-driven decision-maker comfortable with model performance metrics, scorecards, and statistical concepts
• A confident communicator who can engage technical teams, risk specialists, and senior leaders
• Able to influence without authority and balance risk appetite, customer experience, and commercial growth

The mindset they’re after
• Risk-aware and customer-conscious: you see good risk management as enabling better customer outcomes
• Pragmatic and delivery-focused: you know when progress beats perfection
• AI-enabled: you actively use modern AI tools (such as Claude, Cursor, n8n, and Notion automations) day to day, to research fraud typologies, write sharper specs, synthesize risk data, and prototype detection improvements. Fluency across the current AI landscape is a baseline expectation, not a differentiator
• Comfortable in fast-moving environments where the threat landscape shifts quickly
• Committed to the craft: you invest in your development as a PM and can articulate the frameworks that guide how you work