Customer Service & Collections Specialist

Selina Finance Limited; Manchester; Hybrid; GBP 35,000 - 40,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

£35,000–£40,000 gross per annum

25 days' annual leave

Bank holidays

Health Cash Plan

Volunteering allowance

Growth Shares

Annual L&D budget

Cycle to work scheme

3% pension contribution

Monthly socials

Mental health support access

Job summary

Selina Finance Limited in Manchester is seeking a Customer Service & Collections Specialist to own arrears, forbearance, and recovery journeys across secured and unsecured products. You will drive end-to-end improvements, coach junior staff, and support QA while handling day-to-day servicing inquiries.

The role requires 2+ years in a regulated lending environment, strong empathy, and experience shaping collections processes.

Qualifications

• Regulated environment experience: 2+ years in collections/forbearance within FCA-regulated lending.
• Strong communication and empathy for challenging conversations.
• Decision making and ownership of forbearance processes or customer journeys.
• Numeracy and ability to explain repayment plans clearly.
• Hands-on experience withCRM tools such as Salesforce.

Responsibilities

• Proactively contact customers with missed payments to understand circumstances.
• Review income and expenditure to set realistic budgets.
• Propose affordable repayment plans and forbearance arrangements.
• Hold forbearance decision mandate and escalate complex cases.
• Monitor repayment plans and maintain proactive customer contact.
• Map and improve end-to-end arrears journeys from first missed payment to resolution.
• Use technology to reduce manual effort and improve outcomes.
• Own the forbearance toolkit, decision framework, and customer communications.
• Build arrears MI and present trends to leadership.
• Identify vulnerable customers and tailor support accordingly.
• Ensure QA, compliance with FCA, GDPR, and MCOB standards.
• Collaborate with managers to balance workload and service levels.
• Act as primary omnichannel contact for customers via phone, email, and web chat.

Skills

Collections experience

Forbearance

CRM systems

Vulnerability awareness

Tools

Salesforce

Job description

About Selina

At Selina Finance, our mission is to provide exceptional value with simple and flexible financial products. We’re achieving this by building a next-generation digital lender targeting homeowners across the UK. More than £2tn of equity value is locked up in UK homes, while homeowners still need to rely on high-interest-rate consumer loans, credit cards, or overdrafts. We believe this is unfair and unnecessary. We offer a financing product unlike anything else out there, one that is as flexible as a current account, as affordable as a mortgage, and as easy to apply for as a consumer loan.

We are building an incredible team and culture of high performance, development, reward and recognition, ready for the next phase of our adventure, and this is where you come in!

We have 19 different nationalities across our London + Manchester offices

Voted as ‘one of the fastest-growing businesses in the UK’ by Business Leader Growth 500 for 2025

Voted top 30 of ‘Tempos 100 best start-ups to work for 2023’

Disability Confident Committed employer

BCorp Certified

Rated highly in our employee survey on:

Workplace Culture

Work Life/Balance

Employee Recognition

About the Role:

We are looking for a highly empathetic, detail oriented and improvement minded Customer Service & Collections Specialist to join our servicing team in Manchester. You will be our subject matter expert for customers experiencing temporary or long-term payment difficulty across our secured (second charge) and unsecured products, while also supporting day-to-day servicing enquiries when needed. This is not purely an operational role. You will own our arrears, forbearance and recoveries journeys end to end designing, documenting and continuously improving how customers move through them. You will also support QA and coach junior team members to deliver good forbearance outcomes for our customers.

Although this role does not currently have direct line management responsibilities, as the department continues to grow, we foresee that the successful candidate will grow into a supervisory position. Alongside this, the successful candidate will need to be adaptable, splitting their time between driving the team efficiency and providing hands‑on customer service & collections support when needed. The position is suitable for someone who has a strong background in arrears, forbearance or recoveries and who has long term ambitions of growing into a supervisory role.

What will you be doing?

Solutions-Focused Collections & Forbearance

• Proactively contact customers with missed payments or early-stage arrears to understand their current financial circumstances.

• Conduct detailed income and expenditure (I&E) reviews to establish accurate, realistic household budgets.

• Propose and set up affordable, sustainable repayment plans and forbearance arrangements (e.g., short‑term contributions) in line with regulatory expectations.

• Hold a forbearance decision mandate and be the escalation point for complex and vulnerable cases

• Monitor ongoing repayment arrangements and maintain proactive contact with customers to support their return to financial health.

• Map, document & continuously improve the end‑to‑end journey from first missed payment to resolution, litigation referral or recovery

• Use technology to reduce manual effort and improve outcomes

• Own forbearance toolkit and decision framework, contact strategy, customer communications and procedures

• Build and track arrears MI and present trends and risks to leadership

Vulnerable Customer Support

• Actively identify indicators of vulnerability (e.g., physical or mental health changes, life events, financial shocks).

• Provide tailored, sensitive support, adjusting communication styles and solution pathways to meet each customer's specific needs.

Process, Quality, and Compliance

• Conduct first‑line‑of‑defence (1LOD) quality assurance checks providing feedback to colleagues

• Ensure all customer and collections activities strictly adhere to FCA guidelines, GDPR, Consumer Duty, and MCOB standards.

• Actively lead identifying process improvements, helping to streamline operations and enhance the overall customer experience.

• Collaborate with Assistant Customer Service Manager & Senior Customer Service Manager to ensure customer & collections workload is handled efficiently

Omnichannel Customer Support

• Act as the primary, professional, and friendly point of contact for homeowners via phone, email, and web chat.

• Deliver high-quality support on general account servicing, statement requests, payment method updates, and product queries.

• Effectively triage and resolve complex customer escalations, preventing them from turning into formal complaints wherever possible.

About you:

Essential

• Regulated Environment Experience: 2+ years of experience in Collections, forbearance or a hybrid role within an FCA-regulated consumer lending environment (ideally secured or unsecured lending).

• Communication & Empathy: Outstanding active listening and communication skills, with a proven ability to guide difficult financial conversations with empathy, patience, and resilience.

• Decision making & Ownership: Experience making forbearance decisions, and a track record of designing or materially improving collections processes or customer journeys

• Problem Solving & Numeracy: Comfort with household financial figures, budget calculations, and explaining interest accumulation or repayment plan details clearly to customers.

• Systems Familiarity: Strong hands‑on experience using modern CRM systems (such as Salesforce) and standard office productivity suites.

Desirable

• Strong working knowledge of mortgage‑specific collections rules and forbearance frameworks (MCOB).

• Prior experience with formal vulnerability frameworks and FCA dispute/complaint‑handling processes.

Behaviours & Attributes

• Ambitious and career‑driven, with a long‑term aim to move into a supervisory role

• Professional, resilient, and comfortable handling objections and escalations

• Customer‑centric mindset: does the right thing for the customer while meeting business goals.

• Positive attitude, team player, and open to feedback and coaching.

• Organised and disciplined with time, workload, and personal development time.

What we offer:

• £35,000–£40,000 gross per annum, depending on experience

• 25 days' annual leave, plus bank holidays

• Additional 1 day off for every two years you are with us

• 30 days’ work‑from‑anywhere allowance

• Bi-annual Bonus (discretionary)

• Health Cash Plan

• Volunteering allowance

• Growth Shares

• Annual L&D budget

• Cycle to work scheme

• 3% pension contribution

• Monthly socials

• Free access to mental health support

• A choice of benefits that work for you, courtesy of our benefits platform, ‘Thanks Ben’

• Annual £60 cycle allowance for Santander cycles or Evans (via ‘Thanks Ben’)

• Workplace Nursery Benefit, allowing eligible nursery costs to be paid via salary sacrifice

Our Values

Our values underpin how we work together as a high-performing team, driving our growth and success.

Take Ownership - We all act as owners. We make decisions in the best interest of the company. We pride ourselves on solving problems, not finding barriers. We have a bias for action; we move fast and we deliver.

Customer Obsessed - We put our customers at the heart of everything we do. We listen to their needs and work tirelessly to provide them with the best possible products and experiences.

Drive Change - We are pioneers in our industry. We are not afraid to challenge the status quo, and we constantly seek out new and better ways of doing things. We are agile and adaptable, and we embrace change as an opportunity for growth.

Empower Our Team - We believe that collaboration and teamwork are the cornerstones of success, and we set up our team for great achievements.

We are an equal opportunities employer and are committed to ensuring that no applicant or employee receives less favourable treatment on the grounds of gender, age, disability, religion, belief, sexual orientation, marital status, or race, or is disadvantaged by conditions or requirements that cannot be shown to be justifiable. We also welcome and encourage applications from traditionally underrepresented groups and provide feedback to all candidates we interview, even if that feedback suggests another candidate may be a better fit for the role.