About the Role
This position will be a part of the Credit & Fraud Risk – New Accounts team for International Card Services Japan – a large, fast growing, and highly visible portfolio.
The incumbent will be responsible for managing credit risk strategies for new accounts acquisitions, supporting profitable business growth through effective underwriting, data driven decision making, and continuous enhancement of risk management capabilities.
Responsibilities
•Credit Risk management: Develop, implement, and optimize credit risk underwriting strategies across the new accounts acquisition lifecycle for consumer and commercial portfolio
•Portfolio Performance: Monitor and manage key acquisition risk metrics, credit performance, and portfolio profitability. Identify emerging risks, assess expected and unexpected credit losses, and recommend strategies to improve portfolio profitability, and support sustainable growth.
•Risk Capabilities & Innovation: Drive continuous enhancement of underwriting capabilities through improved use of internal and external data, credit bureaus, financial information, and advanced analytical techniques to strengthen risk assessment and decisioning.
•Business Growth & Strategic Initiatives: Support strategic growth initiatives, including new product launches/refreshes, acquisition channels, and underwriting enhancements, ensuring alignment between risk management strategies and business objectives.
•Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with central risk teams, and local business stakeholders across product, marketing, technology, operations, and compliance to develop and execute effective credit risk strategies.
•Market Risk SME: Serve as a key liaison between the Japan risk team and central risk teams, representing local market perspectives and translating market specific insights, business priorities, and regulatory considerations into actionable risk strategies and initiatives in partnership with central teams.
•Risk Governance & Market Awareness: Ensure complete adherence to applicable local laws and regulations, internal policies, and risk governance standards while maintaining awareness of evolving economic, regulatory, and competitive environments impacting the business.
Requirements
Interpersonal Skills
•Strong relationship-building, communication, and presentation skills.
•Proven ability to build effective partnerships with internal and external stakeholders across marketing, product, sales, compliance, technology, legal, operations, and risk management teams.
•Demonstrated ability to influence business decisions and strategic outcomes through analytical insights and effective collaboration.
Process / System Knowledge
•Strong understanding of credit risk management processes, underwriting strategies, and analytical frameworks used to assess credit risk and evaluate the performance of new accounts acquisitions.
•Ability to develop a thorough understanding of relevant AXP production systems, analytical environments, products, and risk management capabilities.
•Understanding of credit card business economics, credit losses, provisioning, and key drivers of portfolio profitability.
Leadership/Organizational Awareness & Effectiveness
•Proven ability to think and act at an enterprise level.
•Proven ability to navigate and collaborate across different teams and organizations to get things done with a strong sense of ownership and urgency.
•Proven ability to evaluate internal and external business factors and translate analytical insights into actionable risk management strategies.
•Proven ability to make timely, well-informed decisions while maintaining high standards of quality and risk discipline.
Technical Skills and Experience
•5+ years of experience in analytical roles, preferably within credit risk management, financial services, or a related quantitative discipline.
•Strong analytical and problem solving skills with demonstrated experience using data to support business decisions.
•Proficiency in SQL, databases, and Excel; experience with Python is preferred.
•Experience working with credit bureau data, financial statements, bank statements, and other information used in credit risk assessment.
•Familiarity with statistical analysis, predictive modeling, and machine learning techniques is preferred.
•Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, Statistics, Engineering, Economics, Finance, or a related quantitative field preferred.
•Advanced degree in Business, Finance, Statistics, Economics, Mathematics, or a related field is preferred.
•Fluency in English is required.
•Japanese proficiency is preferred.
Other
Employment eligibility to work with American Express in Japan is required as the company will not pursue visa sponsorship for this position.
