Senior Underwriter

About Ryft

Ryft is a regulated payment facilitator and authorised payment institution building the infrastructure layer for modern commerce platforms.

We enable marketplaces, SaaS platforms and multi-party ecosystems to embed and monetise payments natively. Our technology handles onboarding, compliance, orchestration, split payments and revenue sharing, allowing our partners to focus on growth while we manage complexity.

We are now entering the next phase of scale, expanding into new verticals and building a category-defining embedded payments platform.

About the role

We are looking for an experienced Senior Underwriter to join our Underwriting team. As a Payment Facilitator, we onboard and oversee our merchants directly. You will assess and onboard a varied portfolio of these merchants, with a focus on marketplaces and platforms. You will own complex underwriting cases from start to finish. This includes reviewing ownership structures and financial health, setting risk exposure limits, and making clear recommendations that protect the business while helping our merchants grow.

This is a senior position. You will be expected to use sound independent judgement, guide less experienced colleagues, and help improve our underwriting policies, procedures and tools.

Key responsibilities

- Lead the end-to-end underwriting and onboarding of merchants, including complex cases, ensuring decisions follow internal risk appetite, regulatory requirements and card scheme rules.
- Underwrite marketplaces and platforms, assessing the business model, flow of funds and customer journey.
- Onboard merchants with complex organisational structures, including multi-layered ownership, group entities and cross-border structures, identifying ultimate beneficial owners and controllers.
- Screen merchants, directors, UBOs and connected parties for PEP status, sanctions and adverse media using screening tools, and assess and escalate potential matches appropriately.
- Review merchant websites using third-party website monitoring providers to identify content violations, prohibited or restricted products and services, missing or inadequate terms and conditions, refund and privacy policies, and inconsistencies with the declared business model.
- Carry out credit risk analysis on merchants by reviewing financial statements, management accounts and bank statements to evaluate liquidity, profitability, solvency and trading patterns.
- Assess financial exposure, including chargeback, refund and delivery risk (e.g., future delivery and prepayment models), and recommend suitable mitigants.
- Write clear, well-reasoned underwriting summaries and recommendations for approval, setting out key risks, mitigants and the rationale behind each decision.
- Conduct periodic reviews and re-underwriting of existing merchants, monitoring changes in risk profile, processing behaviour and financial standing.
- Work with Sales, Risk, Compliance and other teams to give timely, commercially aware risk decisions.
- Coach and support junior underwriters, reviewing their cases and sharing knowledge across the team.

Requirements

Essential:

- Extensive experience in merchant underwriting, merchant onboarding and credit risk within payments, acquiring, a payment service provider or a related financial services environment.
- Strong knowledge of KYB/KYC, AML and CTF requirements as they apply to merchant onboarding.
- Hands-on experience with PEP, sanctions and adverse media screening tools, and with investigating and resolving potential matches.
- Experience onboarding businesses with complex ownership and organisational structures, and identifying UBOs.
- The ability to perform in-depth credit risk analysis, including interpreting financial statements and bank statements and assessing a merchant's financial strength and risk exposure.

- Sound judgement and the confidence to make and defend risk decisions while balancing commercial objectives.
- Strong attention to detail and the ability to manage several complex cases at once.
- Excellent written communication skills, with the ability to produce concise, well-structured risk summaries and recommendations.
- Fluent written and spoken English.

Desirable:

- Experience with higher-risk sectors such as travel, CBD or charities.
- Knowledge of card scheme risk programmes (e.g., VAMP, MATCH, BRAM) and reserve setting.
- Familiarity with tools such as Dotfile, HubSpot, G2, Endole.