VP Product - Lending & Retention
Remote-USFull-TimeDirectorOther
What You'll Do
- Define Product Vision & Strategy
- Develop and communicate a bold product roadmap for lending and retention aligned with Tala’s mission and growth objectives.
- Balance innovation with portfolio health, risk, and regulatory compliance.
- Capital Markets & Funding Leadership:
- Partner closely with Finance & Capital Markets to ensure sustainable and diversified funding
- Translate portfolio and product performance into narratives that resonate with investors and regulators
- Anticipate and influence macroeconomic and regulatory shifts that impact capital and credit supply
- Own the Customer Lifecycle
- Lead product strategy across the entire lending journey and customer conversion funnel – acquisition, underwriting, disbursement, repayment, and re-engagement.
- Design retention initiatives that drive repeat usage, loyalty, and lifetime value.
- Build & Lead Teams
- Lead, mentor, and grow a world-class product team focused on lending, and retention.
- Foster a culture of impact, innovation, and accountability.
- Lead Best-in-Class Repayments and Recoveries plans
- Identify optimization opportunities to enhance our repayments rates ratio
- Leverage 3rd party best practices and partners to significantly drive recoveries financially
- Global to Local Balance:
- Build a product strategy that drives global lending performance while tailoring execution for local customer, cultural, and regulatory contexts
- Collaborate closely with GMs and market teams to ensure product decisions resonate locally while supporting the enterprise portfolio.
- Drive Performance & Insights
- Establish KPIs for lending product performance, including portfolio quality, customer engagement, and unit economics.
- Leverage data, experimentation, and customer insights to continuously optimize.
- Cross-Functional Leadership
- Partner with risk, operations, finance and marketing to ensure lending products deliver strong financial and social outcomes.
- Collaborate with design and engineering to create seamless, mobile-first experiences.
- Innovation & Differentiation
- Stay ahead of fintech, credit, and retention best practices globally.
- Identify opportunities to introduce new credit features, loyalty programs, or adjacent financial products.
What You Need
- 15+ years of product leadership experience, ideally in fintech, lending, digital banking, or consumer financial services
- Proven track record of scaling lending or retention products in high-growth environments
- Strong understanding of credit dynamics, risk management, and unit economics
- Customer-obsessed with deep empathy for underserved populations and emerging markets
- Experienced leading global, cross-functional teams across product, engineering, and operations
- Analytical and data-driven, with expertise in experimentation, A/B testing, and customer insights
- Strategic thinker who can operate at both vision and execution levels
- Excellent communicator and influencer across executive teams, investors, and regulators
- Champion of diversity, inclusion, and building mission-driven cultures
