Product Lead

About Abound We’re redefining consumer lending in the UK, and beyond. Using advanced AI and Open Banking data, we make fair, affordable personal finance available to more people. While traditional lenders rely almost entirely on credit scores, we look at the full financial picture - how much you spend, and what you can afford to repay to build a deeper, more accurate understanding of each customer's unique financial situation. And we've shown it works at scale. We’ve issued over £1.3bn in loans directly to customers while delivering market-leading credit performance - for every 10 defaults the industry expects, we see only 3. We also reached profitability just 2.5 years after launch. Backed by £2bn+ of funding from top-tier investors including Citi, GSR Ventures, and Deutsche Bank, we’re recognised as one of Europe’s fastest-growing fintechs (Sifted, CNBC). Now, we’re expanding into new markets and product lines - and we’re looking for ambitious people who want to learn fast, take ownership, and grow with us. The Role We are hiring a Product Lead to own our Express / Mid-prime personal loan product, one of our highest-priority growth areas. This is unsecured personal lending in the higher-APR mid-prime space (30% to 50% APR), with loans typically from £2,000 to £10,000, and customers acquired primarily through price-comparison and aggregator marketplaces. Our ambition is to grow this product many times over while improving its economics, and this role owns the product that makes that happen. This is a product role first. You will own the Express/Mid-prime proposition end to end: who we serve, how we quote and present offers on marketplaces, how the journey converts, how we price, and how the product performs once the loans are on the book. What makes it different from a typical product role is that the product is credit. The levers that drive growth, such as eligibility, pricing, offer design and underwriting, are the same levers that drive loss rates, so you need to be comfortable working with risk and data science rather than handing that part off. We think this is a great role for someone with around four to five years of experience who has built a strong foundation in lending or fintech, has worked hands-on with data and credit decisioning, and is ready to own a product outright rather than a slice of one. You will set the direction for the segment, run the roadmap, and be accountable for the results, with the backing of experienced risk, data science and commercial leaders around you. Our decisioning is built on Open Banking and cashflow underwriting rather than credit scores alone. For a higher-APR population acquired through marketplaces, seeing real affordability is what lets us select and price better than the market. The interesting product problem is that richer data comes at a cost to conversion, so the job is to capture that data advantage while designing a journey and offer that customers actually complete. The defining challenge is balance: scaling volume by an order of magnitude while building a book of genuinely good credit quality. The best people in this space know that those two goals can be reconciled rather than traded off, and are curious enough to work out how. What you'll be doing - Own the Express / Mid-prime product: proposition, roadmap, performance and economics, with direct accountability for the balance between growth and credit quality. - Lead how we quote and present offers across aggregator and price-comparison marketplaces, optimising eligibility, risk-based pricing and offer presentation to win the right customers at the point of acquisition. - Own conversion through the journey, from quote to disbursal, including how we ask customers for Open Banking data and how that affects drop-off and the quality of the book. - Understand and actively manage adverse selection in marketplace-acquired lending, shaping offer, pricing and decisioning strategy to attract the customers we want and screen out the risk we do not. - Work with data science to make sure our credit models are calibrated and tuned for this population rather than inherited unchanged from prime or adjacent segments, and be able to get into the data yourself when needed. - Use credit and commercial insight to optimise unit economics, balancing approval rates, pricing, loss rates and volume so the product scales profitably. - Monitor product and portfolio performance across the customer lifecycle, spotting emerging trends, risks and opportunities early. - Shape underwriting strategy, segmentation, credit policy and decisioning logic in partnership with risk and data science. - Design and evaluate experiments and strategy changes, and turn the analysis into clear, actionable recommendations. - Own the management information for the segment: define the metrics, monitoring and reporting that let the business make consistent decisions about the product. - Assess new initiatives, customer segments and product changes with both a commercial and a credit lens. - Present clear, structured updates on product performance to senior leadership and governance forums, and support funding and due diligence conversations where the product is in focus. Who you are - A product person at heart: you care about the customer, the journey and the commercial outcome, and you want to own something end to end. - Quantitative and hands-on. You are comfortable in SQL and Python (or similar), you can interrogate a dataset yourself, and you can hold your own in a conversation with data scientists about model performance and calibration. - Credit-literate. You understand how eligibility, pricing and underwriting decisions shape the book you end up with, and you have a working understanding of adverse selection and why it matters in marketplace lending. - Commercially sharp, with a solid grasp of unit economics and a clear understanding that product decisions in lending have to work for both growth and portfolio performance. - Curious about trade-offs rather than defensive about them: alert to the fact that deeper affordability assessment can hurt conversion, and motivated by the challenge of capturing its value without sacrificing growth. - Able to move between detail and direction: happy getting into the data on a Tuesday and shaping the roadmap on a Wednesday. - Confident challenging assumptions and turning analysis into practical action, and able to explain your reasoning clearly to people who are not analysts. - Collaborative and credible with risk, commercial, engineering and data science teams. - Structured, proactive and comfortable in a scaling environment where priorities evolve quickly and ownership is expected. Experience and background - Around four to five years of experience in product, credit strategy, analytics or a closely related role within consumer lending or fintech. We are deliberately targeting this level: this is a step-up role for someone ready to own a product, not a lateral move for someone who has run several. - Experience in unsecured consumer lending, ideally Unsecured Personal Loans (UPL), with exposure to the mechanics of acquiring customers through price-comparison or aggregator marketplaces. Direct experience in higher-APR or near-prime lending is a strong plus but not a prerequisite. - Hands-on data skills: SQL as a minimum, and ideally Python or R for analysis. You do not need to be a data scientist, but you need to be able to work alongside them as a peer and do your own analysis. - Experience working with or alongside credit decisioning, scorecards or risk models, and an understanding of how they are built, monitored and adjusted for a specific population. - Some experience of pricing, eligibility or offer design, and of using experiments or A/B tests to evaluate changes. - A track record of using analysis to influence decisions, not just to report on outcomes, in a role where you had some accountability for commercial results. - Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to present clearly to senior stakeholders. - Experience with Open Banking data or cashflow underwriting is a plus, as is experience in a fast-growing fintech. What we offer: - Everyone owns a piece of the company - equity - Hybrid with 3 days a week in the office - 25 days’ holiday a year, plus 8 bank holidays - 2 paid volunteering days per year - One month paid sabbatical after 4 years - Employee loan - Free gym membership - Team wellness budget to be active together - set up a yoga class, a tennis lesson or go bouldering