Operations Strategy Manager

We’re here because we believe in small businesses. We believe they deserve better than waiting weeks for a loan. And we believe it’s our job to help them grow.

We started in 2012 with these principles, and we hold true to them today – now that we’re one of the fastest-growing fintechs in Europe. In the time between, we’ve built the best tech platform in lending, won several awards and opened up £3.5 billion in loans to over 70,000 businesses.

So what’s next? Our mission now is to help one million businesses who need us. To do this, we’ll need new products and partnerships. But most of all, we’ll need smart, hands-on people to join us on the journey and get us to our goal.

Requirements

At iwoca, we’re building an exceptional operations team, and we are constantly looking for ways to improve the quality and efficiency of the service we provide to our customers. Our Operations Strategy team works across People Operations, Customer Success, Credit Analysts, Collections & Legal and our support team in India, to identify and implement improvements across each function.

As an Operations Strategy Manager you’ll improve our understanding of Operations performance, drive efficiencies and improve service. To achieve this you will:-

• Work with Operations to identify problems that need solving, such as:
  • What is the optimal contact strategy for the Customer Success team to employ, in order to drive conversion through the funnel? How do we test this?
  • What is the value of calling delinquent customers and how do we test this?
  • What metrics can we use to measure the performance of our Customer Success team?
  • How can we most accurately forecast capacity needs for each team, to ensure we remove all operations bottlenecks?
• Analyse data to inform your answers and shape an effective solution
• Take responsibility for implementing these changes, working closely with Ops and Tech & Analytics in the process
• Understand strategic developments across the business and identify how they will impact Operations, and how Operations will need to adapt in order to support future strategies

You’ll work on a variety of fast-paced projects, learning from tests and effecting changes that really make an impact.

In this role, you will work closely with our COO and have significant exposure to senior management, as well as stakeholders from across the business (including Tech, Analytics, Marketing & Finance).

What we’re looking for:-

• Someone who already has some experience of working in a top-tier strategy consulting or banking firm, or in an analytical role. You’ll have some strong foundation skills which you’re looking to build out while working on really impactful projects
• Experience using frameworks to analyse issues, structure effective presentations and solve complex problems
• Someone who is superbly analytical (we live and breathe data) with exceptional Excel skills. Experience with Python is a plus
• A natural curiosity to spot, break down and resolve problems
• Resourceful and confident to conduct & leverage primary and secondary research to derive data-led insights in an imperfect world (i.e. when you never have all the data you’d like, exactly as you’d like it)
• Proven ability or demonstrable desire to implement findings of your research, we need a ‘doer’ who is comfortable rolling up their sleeves and working across the business to see through the results of your work
• Team player with a fine balance of confidence, gravitas, humility and enthusiasm: you will need to work with various teams to get stuff done in a rapidly growing environment where resources are continuously stretched
• Dependable, hard-working and uncompromising in delivering high-quality work in tight timelines
• Exceptional levels of personal integrity, given you’ll be exposed to a number of commercially and strategically sensitive projects
• Excited about helping small businesses thrive - belief in our mission is important!

Don’t take this list as prescriptive: it’s just to give you a sense of who might do well at the job. We’d still love to hear from you if you don’t hit every point on the list, or if you have other experience.

Benefits

Our benefits

We put a lot of effort into making iwoca a brilliant place to work:

• Offices in London, Leeds and Frankurt
• Events and clubs, like bingo, comedy nights, yoga classes, football…
• Two company retreats a year, we’ve been to France, Italy, Spain and further afield
• Plenty of drinks and snacks in our offices.

Our benefits package is second-to-none:

• Medical insurance from Vitality, including discounted gym membership
• 25 days’ holiday and an extra day off for your birthday
• Instant access to emotional and mental health support with our partner, Spill
• Share options
• Generous maternity leave and shared parental (?) leave
• A nursery tax benefit scheme to help you save money
• Paid volunteering time to support your chosen charity
• Extra leave if you want to travel or study
• One-month fully paid sabbaticals after 4 years
• Cycle-to-work scheme and electric car scheme

And to make sure we all keep learning, we offer:

• An L&D budget for everyone, including a book budget
• Company-wide talks with internal and external speakers
• Access to learning platforms like Treehouse if you want to learn to code.