Head of Banking Partnerships & Operations (Basé à London)

We strongly encourage applications from people of colour, the LGBTQ+ community, people with disabilities, neurodivergent people, parents, carers, and people from lower socio-economic backgrounds. If there’s anything we can do to accommodate your specific situation, please let us know.

About Cleo: Most people come to Cleo to do work that matters. Every day, we empower people to build a life beyond their next paycheck, building a beloved AI that enables you to forge your own path toward financial well-being. Backed by some of the most well-known investors in tech, we’ve reached millions of people to support them throughout their financial lives, from their first paycheck to their first home and beyond. We’re hitting headlines too. This year, Forbes named us as one of their Next Billion Dollar Startups, and we were crowned the 'Hottest Tech Scaleup' at the Europas.

Cleo builds a relationship with her customers that helps them transform their financial health, and gets them the products they need to save them money and reach their goals. As we scale, we’re bringing new features and products into the ecosystem at whiplash-inducing pace - across spending cards, credit score coaching services and beyond. To make this work at our global scale we’re looking for someone to manage banking partnerships operations across the Cleo platform.

As the Head of Banking Partnerships and Operations, you will be a crucial part of the team scaling Cleo. Your focus will be on operationalizing our card, direct deposit, and savings programs, and all future banking-related products, working closely with external partners, as well as product, engineering and customer support teams. This role reports into the Director of Operations & Partnerships.

What you will be doing:

• Leading: You will be responsible for leading the team that supports all the banking partners and their operations, including but not limited to, banking partner & processing relationship management, complaints, disputes, audits and more.
• Operations Excellence: Working to elevate the visibility, performance, and importance of operations across the company, expanding current remit, and strengthening cross-functional relationships - including integration with product, engineering and more. Serving as a central hub of all resource and knowledge around operations and securing resources to enable operations and product teams.
• Collaboration & building a tight ship: You are the glue between product and Cleo’s external banking partners, ensuring a seamless flow of information and delivery, while also building processes to simplify and improve the collaboration between the two.
• Partnerships: You will oversee the management of all the relationships with our external banking partners to serve complex financial products, overseeing the day-to-day management of tasks, issue escalation and fraud/compliance oversight.
• Credit Card and Banking Operations: You will oversee all of the normal operations behind banking products, including audits, testing, quality assurance, as well as traditional credit operations including disputes, complaint management, credit reporting and more.
• Product ops: Your team serves as the glue between the product, operations and compliance structure - you will oversee and help build out processes, success measures and executing on initiatives to operationalize Cleo’s banking operations, improve our systems and hit OKRs.

About you:

• You have worked in partnerships, operations or with third party banking providers.
• You have worked within a financial technology company and/or have experience in the financial technology sector, 8+ years experience.
• You have led teams of 4+ people, and have experience managing across a horizontal business, and experience in leadership functions.
• You have participated in a senior leadership function, helping drive strategy and making clear business decisions.
• You can demonstrate a sharp analytical mind, and the ability to identify root-cause issues.
• You have the ability to distill complex issues into structured frameworks and action plans, and communicate them clearly across company disciplines.
• You’re good at working from 0-1 on problems and can share examples of teams or operational processes and systems that you have led from idea to execution.

Nice to haves:

• You have worked in consumer lending, in cards before, and know how to operate at a fast pace with care.
• You have worked at a VC-backed startup before, and seen hyper-growth in action.
• You have managed sensitive commercial relationships with external vendors successfully, and can give examples of where you made a tangible business or customer impact through your relationships with these vendors.
• You have experience improving processes and efficiency for customer-facing teams.
• Experience in project management.

What do you get for all your hard work?

• A competitive compensation package (base + equity) with reviews every 8 months. This position is a BDP5 level and we can pay £98,129 - £128,008 p.a depending on experience.
• Work at one of the fastest-growing tech startups, backed by top VC firms like Sofina, Balderton & EQT Ventures.
• A clear progression plan. We want you to keep growing. That means trying new things, leading others, challenging the status quo and owning your impact. Always with our complete support.
• Flexibility: We treat you as humans first, employees second. This means all the usual perks but it also means flexibility. We take pride in being a flexible workplace that trusts our Cleople to deliver their best work, giving you the autonomy to structure your day around morning drop-offs to school or daily dog walks.
• Hybrid-first: Join our hybrid-first team, where we blend the best of both remote and in-office work. We expect our team members to be in our London office 1-2 times a week.
• Other benefits; 25 days annual leave a year + public holidays (+ an additional day for every year you spend at Cleo).
• 6% employer-matched pension in the UK.
• Company-wide performance reviews every 8 months e.g every 2 terms, in line with our termly cycles (Jan-April, May-Aug, Sept-Dec): Generous pay increases for high-performers and high-growth team members.
• Equity top-ups for team members getting promoted.
• Private Medical Insurance via Vitality, dental cover, and life assurance.
• Enhanced parental leave.
• 1 month paid sabbatical after 4 years at Cleo.
• Regular socials and activities, online and in-person.
• We'll pay for your OpenAI subscription.
• Online mental health support via Spill.
• And many more!