Collections and Recoveries Team Leader

Role Overview

This is a front-line leadership position accountable for how a collections and recoveries team performs across both SME and consumer lending portfolios. The jobholder sets direction for a group of recovery agents and for the third-party agencies working alongside them, making sure that daily contact activity, account actions and escalations steadily pull a delinquent book back toward health instead of allowing it to age further. Effort is weighted across four areas — business delivery, customer experience, people leadership and control discipline — and the clearest measures of success are reduced credit losses, a well-managed portfolio and clean audit outcomes.

Key Responsibilities

• Translate agreed stretch targets into team and individual work plans, then drive day-to-day collections and recoveries activity on the allocated SME and consumer portfolios to deliver against them.
• Own the escalation point for collection-related customer issues — investigate queries and complaints to their root cause, resolve them at first contact wherever possible, and turn recurring themes into tactical or strategic improvements for the portfolio.
• Make sure collection actions are taken promptly, in line with policy guidelines, collections strategy, process and regulatory requirements, and that the systems of record are updated accurately so no account is left to deteriorate.
• Brief, manage and hold external debt collection agencies and other third-party providers to account for recovery results and service quality on the portfolios assigned to them.
• Train, monitor and evaluate internal recovery agents and agency partners, including real-time call listening, to verify that coaching is being applied in practice and to spot where further development is needed.
• Review daily, weekly and monthly reporting on the team's credit facilities, act on what those reports reveal, and maintain complete records of all customer communication.
• Build productive relationships with the branch network and key support functions so that collections performance improves across the wider business rather than in isolation.
• Identify risks within the collections environment, put effective mitigations in place, uphold banking policies and procedures, and help the function maintain satisfactory audit ratings.

Requirements & Qualifications

• University degree or an equivalent professional qualification.
• Proven operations management experience, supported by customer service and relationship management exposure.
• Practical understanding of how external debt collection agencies operate and of the vendor engagement model used to manage them.
• Solid grounding in sound lending principles and credit risk assessment, plus familiarity with retail credit policy, collections and recoveries strategy, and debt management and banking systems.
• Working knowledge of the bank's customer service standards, its retail customer proposition, and its bookkeeping procedures and core systems.
• Strong interpersonal range — able to handle difficult conversations with customers in financial distress as confidently as interactions with agents, agency partners, branch colleagues and senior stakeholders.
• Good computer literacy and the ability to pick up new software and applications quickly.
• Awareness of the local competitor landscape and a working command of basic risk management techniques.

Why Join

You will lead a team with a real mandate over how its portfolio performs, rather than administering a process someone else has designed. The book spans consumer and SME lending, which gives the role genuine breadth, and the job is expected to be run with a high degree of autonomy — ideal for someone who makes their own calls while keeping their line manager properly informed. You will also hold direct responsibility for external agency relationships, adding vendor-management exposure to the internal leadership side of the role. The team culture values coaching, constructive challenge to the status quo, and the sharing of knowledge and best practice, and improvement ideas that emerge from root-cause analysis of customer issues are actively encouraged.