Credit SME

This role sits at the intersection of credit risk and technology delivery, acting as the primary business authority for defining and prioritising requirements for a bank's collateral management system. The SME brings deep, practitioner-level knowledge of collateral processes, encompassing eligible collateral schedules, haircuts and margining methodologies (variation and initial margin), collateral optimisation and substitution, dispute management, and the legal underpinnings of collateral arrangements such as ISDA CSAs, GMRAs and GMSLAs. Working closely with credit risk, treasury, legal, operations and technology teams, the individual translates business need and regulatory obligation (including EMIR, Uncleared Margin Rules, and Basel credit risk mitigation requirements) into a clear, prioritised set of functional and non-functional requirements that reflect what the business genuinely needs from the new platform, rather than what is simplest to build.

Day to day, the SME leads requirements workshops and elicitation sessions with stakeholders across the front office, credit risk, and operations, converting often conflicting or loosely defined asks into a coherent backlog, ranked by regulatory deadline, risk reduction, and operational value. This includes defining acceptance criteria for core collateral capabilities such as margin call generation and settlement, automated substitution and optimisation logic, real-time exposure and collateral position views, and downstream integration with credit risk, treasury and regulatory reporting systems. The SME is expected to own the trade-offs inherent in prioritisation decisions, explaining clearly to sponsors and delivery teams why one capability is sequenced ahead of another, and adjusting the backlog as new regulatory deadlines, incidents, or business priorities emerge.

Critically, this is not a purely facilitative role. The SME must be credible enough, through direct experience running or overseeing collateral operations, to challenge internal experts, including senior credit officers, legal counsel, and solution architects, when a proposed requirement, design choice, or assumption does not hold up against how collateral risk actually needs to be managed or how the bank is regulated. That means being comfortable pushing back with evidence (regulatory text, incident history, market practice) rather than deferring on seniority alone, while still being collaborative enough to bring sceptical stakeholders to a shared, workable position. The strongest candidates combine that domain depth and confidence with strong written and verbal communication, since much of the role's value lies in making a complex, judgement-heavy space legible to both business sponsors and technical delivery teams.