Founding Customer Service Specialist - UK in London

About Fairlo

The story of Fairlo began when our founders, Jimmy and Shamon, saw first-hand how unfair and predatory lending practices can trap people in cycles of debt. Their mother had been misled by a large bank, and instead of being offered a lifeline, she was pushed further into financial difficulties. That injustice sparked something: to build a company that reimagines credit, rooted in transparency, flexibility and respect. That company became Fairlo.

The way we work

Since launching in 2018, Fairlo has helped tens of thousands of customers access responsible credit when life happens. With approximately 50,000 active users, a 4.8 Trustpilot rating from 4,200+ reviews and an incredibly low churn rate, we are proving that transparency and flexibility are not only the right things to do. They are a winning model.

Job description

To our tight team of around 50 people based in Stockholm, Crete and the UK, we're now looking for an ambitious and versatile customer support specialist to become the very first member of our UK customer operations team. This is a founding role. You won't be joining an established support desk — you'll be building it. But you won't be doing it alone. You'll have the support and experience of our well-established Customer Service team in Sweden and the rest of your colleagues in the UK, while having the freedom to shape what works best for our UK customers and market.

You have the opportunity to set the tone for what customer support looks like in the UK, and to build the processes, templates and judgement calls that a future UK team will inherit and grow from. We want you to be AI-first from day one — comfortable using AI tools to draft and triage responses, speed up manual reviews, and build your own lightweight automations, rather than doing everything by hand.

We believe that you're a self-motivated, versatile people-person who's a real doer, and you're likely keen on learning new things — because in this role, you'll genuinely need to learn a bit of everything. As an ambitious individual, we think you'll appreciate the opportunity to grow alongside the rest of the team, the business, and within your own remit. You enjoy talking to customers and you'll look to create sustainable processes across service, collections and onboarding to serve them effectively.

Likewise, a solution-oriented mindset with a proactive approach is a must. You're calm under pressure and can make others listen, but also have that approach that makes the customer feel relaxed enough to talk to you. You're also not afraid of using new digital tools.

Some of the benefits of working as our first UK Customer Support Specialist are:

• Being part of a proven, well-loved company that has a fantastic reputation with its customers.
• Join a group of like-minded people who love creating great customer experiences.
• Working at a company where respect for the customer saturates the entire business.
• A genuinely broad, varied role — no two days are the same, and you'll build real expertise across service, collections and fraud.
• An opportunity to grow your role together with the business, shaping the UK team as it grows around you.
• Being a huge part in creating the best possible customer experience at Fairlo in the UK, in line with our reputation for fairness.

Role details

As the first point of contact for UK customers, you'll cover two areas:

Customer service

• Be our person on the front lines in the UK, representing our aspiration for mutual respect and simplicity in communication.
• Own the end-to-end customer experience — answering questions, resolving issues, and making sure every interaction reflects our vision of a flexible and transparent financial company.
• Build the customer service structure, templates and processes for the UK from the ground up, since you'll be the first person doing this work here.
• Keep a constant ear to the ground and feed back what customers are saying about Fairlo to the wider business.

Collections

• Handle customers in financial difficulty with empathy, using processes and procedures that are scalable as the team grows.
• Understand the customer based on minimal interaction to instinctively offer the right tools or point customers to debt advice.
• Perform detailed income and expenditure reviews with customers, and work creatively to find the right solution even when options are limited.
• Work with third parties to make collections processes efficient.

Across all of the above

• Share feedback and review data to look for ways we can improve our service, collections and fraud processes and the customer experience across the business.
• Act as the eyes and ears for the UK operation, flagging trends, risks and opportunities as they emerge.
• Use AI tools deliberately across the role — to draft and triage responses, speed up manual reviews, and spot patterns in the data — so the function is efficient and AI-first from the very start.

Requirements

First and foremost, we're looking for a great mindset and a can-do attitude. Nevertheless, we still believe that certain skills are valuable for our first UK Customer Support Specialist. Therefore, we believe you've got:

• An AI-first mindset: you already reach for AI tools like Claude or ChatGPT to work faster, and you're excited to build them into service, collections and fraud workflows from day one, not bolt them on later.
• A few years of experience in customer service, collections, fraud/risk, or a similar customer-facing financial services role — ideally some exposure to more than one of these areas.
• Comfort handling sensitive conversations, including customers in financial difficulty, with empathy and professionalism.
• Organisational skills, and the ability to prioritise across genuinely different types of work in the same day.
• Experience working with customer service, collections and/or case management systems, and a general knack for computer systems and tools — interest in tech.
• A relaxed but professional approach to talking to customers over the phone, and a skill for clarity and friendliness when writing in chat, emails and on forums.
• A sharp, sceptical eye for detail — the instinct to notice when something doesn't add up.
• Outstanding interpersonal communication skills, and what it takes to be a good team player, even when working solo day-to-day.
• Comfort working independently and making judgement calls without a large team around you, at least in the early days of the role.

We'd be delighted if you also have:

• Experience from working with debt collection strategy optimisation.
• Experience setting up or building a customer support, collections or risk function from scratch.
• Experience using AI tools (e.g. Claude, ChatGPT, or similar) to automate or speed up customer service, collections or risk workflows.

We hope we've piqued your interest and are looking forward to your application! And, don't wait too long to apply, we would like for you to start as soon as possible!