Team Lead - Credit Risk

About the role:

To report to the Senior Manager, International Credit, and lead the Central of Excellence for Global Credit team supporting APAC, EMEA, LATAM out of Malaysia. The Team Lead inspires, mentors, and develops a high-performing team to optimize impact and drive excellence. The Team Lead collaborates with country credit teams, providing credit risk guidance and recommendations to the senior management while driving operational improvements through innovative solutions. Strong analytical skills are essential to identify trends, risks, and opportunities, with the Team Lead also offering expert support to countries as needed.

The successful candidate possesses dynamic, inclusive, and collaborative leadership qualities. He/She fosters open communication, creating a culture of trust and transparency. Emphasizing employee empowerment, the Team Lead encourages independence, creativity, and innovation within the team. He/She should actively promote teamwork, valuing diverse perspectives to drive continuous improvement and achieve shared goals.

Key deliverables:

• Collaboration and communication
• Build strong partnerships with the global credit team across the continents and collaborate with cross-functional teams to ensure credit risk exposures are well-managed and stay within acceptable limits.
• Help management to understand the DSO and working capital trends.
• Engage with internal and external stakeholders, including credit insurers, to drive risk management initiatives by strengthening credit decision-making, and maintaining consistent communication with strategic guidance.
• Risk Management
• Ensure the delivery of insightful reporting, identifying risks, and suggesting appropriate actions.
• Proactively monitor credit risk exposures and conduct portfolio analyses, participating in refining strategies based on lessons from past bad debts to mitigate future risks.
• Lead the development and implementation of tools to strengthen credit risk analytics in the increasingly complex environment, ensuring continuous improvement and agile adaptation to emerging risks.
• Credit Review
• Lead the team in conducting comprehensive credit risk assessments to evaluate customer creditworthiness based on credit data, trading history, and financial statements, while being able to articulate the findings with strong writing skills to determine the associated risks.
• Provide senior management with expert credit risk guidance by delivering strategic recommendations on credit approvals, bad debt mitigation, and comprehensive risk management strategies.
• Process optimization and global initiatives
• Participating in identifying and implementing opportunities for process simplification and automation by streamlining workflows, while regularly assessing and providing feedback to address process gaps, and ensure alignment with global frameworks.
• Support global initiatives, including automation, process harmonization, and new rollouts, ensuring thorough follow-up on identified risks and gaps.
• Team management
• Act as a leader for the team, exercising sound judgment in decision-making.
• Strengthen individual and team capabilities through training and coaching, emphasizing both technical skills and broader commercial/soft skills development.
• Cultivate a culture of continuous improvement by empowering team members to drive initiatives and promoting an open, collaborative, and learning-oriented environment.
  
  

Requirements:

• Minimum 10-12 years of experience of relevant work experience in credit management from an MNC organization, complemented by 3-5 years strong track record in people management.
• Embraces change, particularly in new ways of working, and understands the best way to operate in a transforming digital business (i.e., curious, challenges status quo, adaptable, growth mindset, analytical, knows how to harness the solutions and data at their disposal)
• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills with cultural differences and sensitivity.
• Demonstrate critical thinking and proactive problem-solving skills, supported by solid experience in data analytics.
• SAP knowledge is an advantage.
• Experience with credit insurance is an asset.
• Excellent command of English and the ability to understand the Chinese language would be an advantage.