Vice President, Lending

Worth Credit Union is seeking a dynamic senior leader to transform our lending programs. The Vice President, Lending leads WCU's lending function in full: consumer, mortgage, and commercial credit, underwriting standards and credit decisioning, and portfolio quality and credit risk strategy, reporting to the Chief Growth and Marketing Officer.

This role holds both the standards and the execution for lending: it sets underwriting policy and credit risk appetite within enterprise parameters set by the Board and the Chief Risk, Legal and Compliance Officer, and it runs production, staffing, and process discipline across every lending channel. Because the role reports into Growth rather than into a standalone credit seat, the VP of Lending carries explicit accountability for keeping credit decisioning independent of growth targets and for escalating any pressure on underwriting standards rather than absorbing it.

Major Duties & Responsibilities

Consumer, Mortgage, and Commercial Lending

• Run day-to-day loan origination across consumer, mortgage, and commercial lending, ensuring consistent process, turnaround time, and member experience across every channel
• Set channel-level production plans, capacity, and staffing in alignment with the CGMO's growth and product priorities
• Own loan officer performance, productivity standards, and pipeline management across all three lending lines
• Coordinate with branch and digital origination points so lending processes support both physical and digital application paths without inconsistency
• Monitor origination volume, mix, and cycle time; elevate capacity or process issues that put member experience or portfolio quality at risk

Underwriting Standards and Credit Decisioning

• Set and maintain underwriting standards, credit policy, and pricing parameters for consumer, mortgage, and commercial lending, within the enterprise risk appetite approved by the Board and the Chief Risk, Legal and Compliance Officer
• Own underwriting team decisioning quality, consistency, and turnaround against service-level expectations
• Identify underwriting exceptions, policy gaps, and emerging risk patterns; adjust standards within approved risk appetite and elevate material policy changes to the CGMO and the CLRCO
• Maintain underwriting documentation and audit-readiness in support of examiner and internal audit review

Portfolio Quality and Credit Risk Strategy

• Own portfolio performance, delinquency, and loss trend monitoring across consumer, mortgage, and commercial books, and set the operational credit risk strategy that follows from it
• Build and maintain early-warning indicators: vintage performance, channel quality, and portfolio concentration
• Partner with collections and loss mitigation functions to manage portfolio quality issues as they emerge
• Contribute credit quality intelligence and loss-forecasting input directly to the CFO's reserve and provisioning process

Growth Alignment and Credit Decisioning Independence (reporting relationship with the Chief Growth and Marketing Officer)

• Receive acquisition targets, segment priorities, and marketing-driven pipeline from the CGMO and translate them into origination capacity, staffing, and channel plans
• Hold the underwriting decision independent of growth targets even within the CGMO reporting line: per the Lean Model boundary, Growth sets the target and Lending decides whether and on what terms a loan gets made
• Escalate directly to the RIsk and the CEO, not only to the CGMO, if growth targets and underwriting standards come into tension; this escalation path is a standing accountability of the role, not a discretionary option

Branch-Based Loan Origination (in partnership with the Chief Operating Officer)

• Own underwriting standards, product criteria, and the credit decision itself for loans originated through the branch network
• Partner with the Operations on branch staffing and the member-facing origination experience
• Align branch lending workflows and turnaround expectations with the Operation’s service delivery standards

Credit Risk Reserve and Provisioning (in partnership with the Chief Financial Officer)

• Supply portfolio credit quality data and loss-forecasting input to the CFO on a regular cadence
• Support the CFO's reserve methodology and provisioning process with accurate, timely portfolio performance detail; reserve methodology and financial statement impact remain CFO-owned

First-Line and Second-Line Credit Risk Oversight (in partnership with the Chief Risk, Legal and Compliance Officer)

• Own first-line credit decisions and day-to-day portfolio management for the enterprise lending function
• Support the Risk’s independent second-line oversight, fair-lending compliance review, and credit policy review with full transparency into underwriting decisions and portfolio data
• Maintain segregation between first-line decisioning and second-line review; do not perform or influence Risk’s independent oversight role, and treat the CLRCO, not the CGMO, as the authority on credit policy and fair-lending compliance

Knowledge & Skills

Business & Financial Services Acumen

• Working knowledge of credit union lending economics, consumer, mortgage, and commercial product structures, and portfolio-level financial impact
• Ability to translate underwriting and portfolio performance into terms meaningful to the CGMO, CFO, Risk, and board-level risk reporting
• Proven track record running multi-channel lending operations at scale across consumer, mortgage, and commercial lines, including setting underwriting standards, not only executing them
• Strong, independent underwriting judgment; disciplined about holding credit standards even when reporting to a growth-oriented executive
• Experience managing loan officer and underwriting team performance against production and quality targets

Cross-Functional Partnership and Independence

• Comfortable operating in a shared-accountability model with Growth, Operations, Finance, and Risk/Compliance peers, while reporting into Growth
• Able to hold the line on credit standards under growth pressure from within the CGMO's own reporting line, and willing to elevate to the Risk team or CEO when needed

Data-Driven Decision Making

• Builds and interprets portfolio performance dashboards: delinquency, vintage curves, channel quality, and cycle time
• Uses early-warning indicators to flag portfolio quality issues before they surface in loss data

Regulatory and Control Awareness

• Working understanding of fair-lending requirements, underwriting documentation standards, and audit and examiner expectations
• Maintains clear segregation between first-line credit decisions and second-line compliance review

Team & Organizational Leadership

• Experience building and leading underwriting and loan origination teams in a growth or transformation context
• Skilled at developing talent and creating accountability for production, quality, and turnaround standards

Qualifications

Experience

• 10+ years of progressive experience in consumer, mortgage, and commercial lending, underwriting, or credit risk management
• At least 5 of those years in a leadership role directly overseeing multi-channel lending operations and underwriting teams
• Credit union or community financial institution experience strongly preferred; comparable community bank lending experience considered
• Experience scaling a lending operation through an asset-growth trajectory such as WCU's current path from roughly $1.3 billion toward $4 billion is a plus

Education

• Bachelor's degree in finance, business administration, accounting, or a related field required
• MBA or equivalent advanced degree preferred, not required

Certifications & Licensure

• NMLS registration required for any personal residential mortgage loan origination activity under the SAFE Act; whether the role itself requires registration depends on final duties and should be confirmed with Compliance and HR
• Certified Credit Union Executive (CCUE) or an equivalent credit union leadership credential preferred
• A credit-risk or lending-specific certification, for example a recognized credit risk certification, is a plus