Senior Merchant Underwriter

Location LATAM (Remote)

Pockyt is building the next era of global payments. Digital wallets, super apps, stablecoin rails, and real-time cross-border networks are changing how people transact, yet today’s payment infrastructure still creates friction for businesses operating globally. Pockyt removes those barriers by delivering a unified payments platform that supports diverse global methods and enables seamless, compliant movement of money across borders. More than 2,000 merchants and over 1 million users rely on Pockyt’s alternative payments infrastructure today.

We are seeking a Senior Merchant Underwriter to lead Pockyt’s global underwriting standards, credit exposure modeling, and ongoing portfolio risk oversight. This role reports directly to the Chief Compliance Officer and is responsible for underwriting strategy, loss modeling, reserve-setting, chargeback management, and merchant performance monitoring. You will build and calibrate internal risk-scoring models, assess complex merchant profiles, and shape underwriting decisions across multiple MCCs, corridors, and payment flows.

This is a high-impact role for someone who understands payment processing at a deep, technical level and can operate independently while influencing executive decisions.

Key Responsibilities

Merchant Underwriting & Exposure Modeling

• Analyze bank statements, processing history, financials, and operating models to quantify expected loss (EL), chargeback rate, and cashflow volatility

• Build and run stress scenarios including promotional spikes, supply shocks, inventory delays, and refund surges to size credit exposure, refund liability, and reserve requirements

• Segment merchants by MCC, industry, product flow, and corridor to benchmark loss bps and price risk appropriately

• Establish and recommend risk-adjusted MDR, per-transaction fees, reserves, or other commercial terms

• Set processing caps (daily/weekly), ticket-size limits, and velocity thresholds aligned to liquidity, seasonality, and historical variance

• Evaluate refund and chargeback policies, fulfillment practices, and compelling evidence standards for each merchant’s business model

• Conduct detailed underwriting reviews including MATCH/TMF checks, prior acquirer history, and financial controls

• Perform underwriting on specialty payment operations, enforce and implement reserves, and support client onboarding activities

Risk Scoring & Decisioning Frameworks

• Design and maintain underwriting scoring models (e.g., logistic regression, gradient boosting/XGBoost) to improve detection of high-risk entities at scale

• Develop KRIs, KPIs, and early-warning indicators such as CBR, refund ratio, approval rate changes, issuer-decline patterns, and corridor shifts

• Perform weekly, monthly, and quarterly portfolio reviews; escalate merchants that breach thresholds and adjust limits or reserves accordingly

• Author Underwriting Memos documenting EL math, recommended controls, limits, reserves, and go/no-go decisions; present to the Board

Portfolio Monitoring & Early Warnings

• Run triggered reviews for anomaly spikes, including issuer fraud codes, friendly fraud clusters, corridor-mix changes, or abnormal velocity

• Maintain an active watchlist and escalation protocols in partnership with Operations and Compliance

• Monitor card-network program thresholds (Visa VDMP/GBPP, Mastercard EDM/BRAM, Amex ESRP) and drive merchant action plans pre-breach

Chargebacks, Disputes & Recovery

• Oversee the full chargeback lifecycle including alerts, representment, and arbitration

• Improve win rates by enforcing compelling evidence standards by channel (card-present, CP-like, CNP)

• Deploy pre-dispute alert programs (Ethoca, Verifi) and refund-before-chargeback strategies where applicable

• Educate merchants on best practices such as fulfillment SLAs, tracking/signature requirements, descriptor hygiene, and dispute-avoidance controls

Transaction Controls & Real-Time Risk

• Calibrate pre-auth rules for BIN/MCC risk, velocity, device/IP, geolocation, merchant tiering, and corridor sensitivity

• Define and adjust 3DS/SCA strategies balancing approval rates with fraud suppression

• Use issuer reason-code feedback, device intelligence, and consortium data to tune detection rules for emerging attack patterns

• Stand up transaction-level monitoring for typologies such as triangulation fraud, refund abuse, and account takeover

Analytics, Reporting & Model Performance

• Build SQL/Python data marts covering authorization, chargeback, settlement, and exposure data

• Produce weekly executive readouts including top merchants by exposure, scheme-program status, reserve adequacy, and emerging risks

• Build loss-curve cohorts by MCC, corridor, and merchant segments; reconcile EL vs actuals; adjust pricing, limits, or reserve levels accordingly

• Run champion-challenger tests on rules and 3DS strategies to optimize approval vs fraud tradeoffs

Required Qualifications

• 5–8 years of experience in merchant underwriting or credit risk for payments, acquiring, PSPs, or high-growth fintech

• Deep understanding of merchant acquiring, chargeback lifecycle, processing flows, and card-network rules

• Proven ability to model expected loss, size reserves, and set processing limits based on financial history and transaction patterns

• Strong statistical and analytical skills with the ability to build or tune underwriting scoring models

• Proficiency in SQL and comfort with Python for modeling, cohort analysis, and metric development

• Ability to make independent, high-judgment underwriting decisions and present recommendations to senior leadership

• Experience with high-risk MCCs, cross-border transactions, alternative payment methods, or complex merchant structures

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with stablecoin settlement, digital wallets, or cross-border payment corridors

• Familiarity with scheme programs including VDMP/GBPP, EDM/BRAM, ESRP

• Prior work in a scaling fintech or fast-paced payment-processing environment

Compensation

Competitive LATAM-aligned compensation with opportunities for growth as the company scales globally.