Collections & Recoveries Lead

Ayan Capital; Greater London; On-site; GBP 65,000 - 90,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Significant ownership from day one

Job summary

Ayan Capital is seeking a proactive collections professional to own the end-to-end lifecycle from pre-arrears to recovery. You will design strategies, speak directly with customers, and drive improvements that protect the books while supporting customers in difficulty.

The role requires a hands-on leader who can balance judgement, data, and customer outcomes in a dynamic fintech environment in London. London office, full-time, with significant ownership from day one.

Qualifications

• Excellent on the phone in difficult conversations with calm, firm and fair outcomes.
• Good judgment to understand customer situations and decide next steps, not just follow a script.
• Prevention-focused mindset to stop arrears before they grow.
• Comfort with data: segment books, spot patterns and test what works.
• Commercially minded: balance customer outcomes with credit losses.
• Fast learner: comfortable handling unfamiliar regulations and processes.
• Ownership and hunger: you will shape this function from day one.

Responsibilities

• Call customers who missed payments, understand circumstances, and agree realistic plans.
• Design early-warning signals, reminders, failed-payment handling and early intervention to prevent arrears.
• Lead financial-d difficulty conversations, including income/expenditure reviews and forbearance options.
• Identify vulnerable customers and provide appropriate support paths.
• Decide when to escalate cases and coordinate with external agencies or legal action if needed.
• Own the journey through default, repossession, and vehicle remarketing.
• Track metrics: arrears, roll rates, cure rates, losses and recoveries; adjust approach as needed.
• Build the collections playbook: processes, communications, records and controls.

Skills

Excellent on the phone

Judgment

Prevention mindset

Data analysis

Commercial mindset

Learning speed

Ownership

Job description

About Ayan

Ayan Capital is a UK fintech founded by the team behind Alif Bank, which serves 10 million customers and processes over $1 billion in transactions every month.

We started with FCA-regulated halal car finance. Since then, we've launched AyanCare, our breakdown protection plan, and we're launching AyanPay, a deferred credit product. We've also closed a £75m funding line.

We're still early. The next step is building financial products for businesses, and the ambition beyond that is to build a global, generational company.

The role

Our finance book is performing well. Your job is to keep it that way as it grows.

You’ll be our first dedicated collections hire, owning the journey from pre-arrears through to recovery.

That means preventing missed payments from becoming problem loans, helping customers who fall into financial difficulty, and recovering money when things go wrong.

This is a hands-on role. You’ll design the strategy, and you’ll also pick up the phone.

What you’ll do

• Call customers who've missed payments, understand what's happened, and agree plans they can realistically keep
• Design how we prevent arrears in the first place: early-warning signals, payment reminders, failed-payment handling and early intervention
• Run financial-difficulty conversations, including income and expenditure reviews, forbearance options and signposting to free debt advice where appropriate
• Identify and support vulnerable customers
• Decide when cases need to escalade and manage what happens next, including external agencies, vehicle recovery and legal action
• Own the journey through default, repossession and vehicle remarketing
• Own the numbers: arrears rates, roll rates, cure rates, promises kept, losses and recoveries
• Understand what's driving those numbers and change the approach when something isn't working
• Build the playbook as you go: processes, communications, records and controls
• Feed what you learn from collections back into underwriting and credit decisions

What we’re looking for

We care more about judgment, ownership and learning speed than years of experience.

You might currently work in collections, credit, underwriting, lending operations or another adjacent area.

What matters is that:

• You're excellent on the phone: calm, firm and fair in difficult conversations, and able to get to an outcome
• You have good judgment: you can understand a customer's situation and decide what should happen next rather than simply following a script
• You think about prevention: you'd rather stop an account rolling at day 5 than recover it at day 90
• You're comfortable with data: you can segment a book, spot patterns and measure whether something you tried actually worked
• You're commercially minded: you care about both customer outcomes and credit losses
• You learn quickly: you’re comfortable getting deep into unfamiliar regulation, processes and systems
• Ownership and hunger: this function is yours to build

Nice to have

• Collections experience in UK consumer finance
• Motor finance experience
• Experience with customers in financial difficulty or vulnerable circumstances
• Late-stage recoveries experience: vehicle recovery, external agencies or litigation
• Credit, underwriting or lending operations experience
• Experience setting up or scaling collections at a young lender

None of these are prerequisites.

Practical details

• Full-time
• London office, five days a week
• Competitive salary
• Significant ownership from day one
• Opportunity to build the function and team as Ayan grows
  

Hiring process

1. Intro conversation

A short conversation about what you've done, how you think and what kind of responsibility you're looking for.

2. Deep-dive

We'll go through situations where you've had to make difficult decisions, deal with customers or solve operational problems.

3. Working session

• We'll give you a real collections problem. We care less about whether you've seen the exact situation before and more about how you understand the problem, what questions you ask, and how you decide what to do.