Outgrow Consulting Pvt Ltd.
Website:
outgrowconsulting.in
Job details:
Role Overview
We are looking for an experienced Chief Risk Officer (CRO) to lead the overall risk function of the Company, with primary responsibility for credit risk, underwriting frameworks, portfolio risk and asset quality.
The Company primarily provides financing for solar projects to MSMEs and microbusinesses across rural and semi-urban India. Our borrowers often have limited formal financial documentation, making the ability to understand underlying business cash flows, assess informal income and use alternative indicators of creditworthiness particularly important.
The CRO will be responsible for building a risk framework that allows the Company to scale its lending business while maintaining strong asset quality. The role requires a combination of strong credit judgement, portfolio-level analytical capability and the ability to build scalable risk processes and systems.
Prior experience underwriting and managing credit risk for rural MSMEs, microbusinesses or a comparable borrower segment is essential.
Key Responsibilities
1. Credit & Risk Strategy
- Own the Company's overall credit and risk strategy, including risk appetite, underwriting philosophy, credit policies and portfolio risk frameworks.
- Develop and continuously refine underwriting frameworks appropriate for rural and semi-urban MSMEs and microbusinesses.
- Balance business growth and financial inclusion objectives with appropriate credit discipline and portfolio quality.
- Establish appropriate risk limits, approval authorities, deviation frameworks and escalation mechanisms.
2. Underwriting & Credit Assessment
- Oversee the credit underwriting process and ensure consistent application of credit policies across products and geographies.
- Develop robust methodologies for assessing borrowers with informal or partially documented income, including cash-flow-based assessment and appropriate financial and non-financial proxies.
- Ensure underwriting appropriately captures business cash flows, seasonality, leverage, repayment capacity, bureau behaviour and other relevant borrower characteristics.
- Maintain the depth of credit judgement required to independently evaluate complex cases and take decisions on material policy deviations.
3. Portfolio Risk Management
- Own portfolio-level credit risk and asset quality across the lifecycle of the loan book.
- Establish dashboards and frameworks to monitor delinquencies, roll rates, vintage performance, bounce rates, concentration risk, credit costs and other key risk indicators.
- Analyse portfolio performance across geographies, borrower segments, industries, sourcing channels, ticket sizes and other relevant cohorts.
- Identify emerging risks and early warning signals and ensure timely corrective action.
- Conduct periodic stress testing and scenario analysis to understand potential portfolio vulnerabilities.
4. Credit Policy & Risk Analytics
- Develop and periodically review credit policies based on actual portfolio performance and evolving business requirements.
- Use portfolio data and cohort analysis to determine which borrower characteristics, underwriting variables and sourcing channels are predictive of credit performance.
- Develop and refine scorecards, risk segmentation and decisioning frameworks as the portfolio scales.
- Ensure that credit policy evolves based on empirical portfolio performance rather than relying solely on traditional banking parameters.
5. Portfolio Feedback & Collections
- Work closely with the Collections team to understand the underlying causes of delinquency and defaults and incorporate these learnings into underwriting and credit policy.
- Establish structured feedback loops between Credit, Risk, Collections, Sales and Operations.
- Analyse recoveries, settlements, repossessions and other resolution outcomes to improve future credit decisions.
6. Fraud & Operational Risk
- Establish frameworks to identify and mitigate borrower, dealer/partner and transaction-level fraud risks.
- Identify operational risks within the loan origination, underwriting, disbursement and servicing processes.
- Work with Operations and Technology to strengthen controls and reduce opportunities for fraud, process failures and data manipulation.
7. Risk Governance
- Establish and maintain appropriate risk governance frameworks in line with RBI requirements and NBFC best practices.
- Lead or participate in relevant management and Board-level risk committees.
- Present portfolio performance, emerging risks, policy changes and key risk indicators to senior management and the Board.
- Ensure appropriate documentation and governance around credit decisions, deviations, policy changes and risk limits.
8. Systems, Data & Technology
- Work closely with Technology and Operations to strengthen risk capabilities within the LOS and LMS.
- Drive automation of credit decisioning and risk monitoring where appropriate while retaining judgement for borrower segments requiring qualitative assessment.
- Improve data capture at origination so that underwriting and portfolio performance can be analysed systematically over time.
- Build scalable risk dashboards and early-warning systems.
9. Team Leadership
- Build, lead and develop the Credit and Risk organisation as the Company scales.
- Establish appropriate structures for central and field credit teams, approval authorities and quality control.
- Develop strong underwriting capabilities within the team, particularly around rural MSMEs and informal-income assessment.
- Build a culture where risk teams combine analytical rigour with practical understanding of borrowers and businesses on the ground.
Requirements & Experience
- Significant experience in credit and risk roles within an NBFC, bank, fintech or other lending institution, with meaningful decision-making responsibility.
- Prior experience underwriting and managing portfolios of rural MSMEs, microbusinesses or similar borrower segments is essential.
- Demonstrated experience managing credit risk at an overall portfolio level.
- Strong experience assessing borrowers where income and business cash flows may be informal, cash-based or not fully reflected in audited financial statements or ITRs.
- Strong understanding of cash-flow-based lending and the use of alternative financial and non-financial indicators to assess repayment capacity.
- Ability to think beyond rigid traditional banking parameters while maintaining strong credit discipline.
- Strong understanding of portfolio analytics, delinquency behaviour, early-warning indicators and credit-loss management.
- Experience developing credit policies, underwriting frameworks, approval matrices and deviation frameworks.
- Experience with LOS/LMS platforms and technology-led underwriting and portfolio monitoring.
- Strong understanding of RBI requirements and risk-management practices applicable to NBFCs.
- Experience building and managing high-performing Credit and Risk teams.
- Strong analytical capability combined with sound commercial judgement and an understanding of on-ground lending realities.
Ideal Candidate
The ideal candidate combines hands-on credit judgement with portfolio-level risk thinking. They should be equally comfortable reviewing the cash flows of a rural microbusiness, analysing portfolio vintages and delinquency trends, challenging an underwriting policy, and presenting the Company's overall credit risk position to senior management or the Board.
Importantly, we are looking for someone who understands that lending to rural MSMEs and microbusinesses cannot always be evaluated through conventional banking documentation alone. The candidate should have experience building disciplined underwriting frameworks around the actual economics and cash flows of these businesses while maintaining strong portfolio quality.
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