Zonal Manager - Education Loan

Job Purpose

Build and grow the education-finance partner ecosystem across universities, overseas education consultants, domestic institutions, DSAs and referral partners.

• Identify, evaluate and onboard suitable education ecosystem partners.

• Create partner business plans covering sourcing, economics, campaigns and governance.

• Manage key accounts through reviews, issue resolution and opportunity tracking.

• Negotiate commercials within approved authority and coordinate approvals.

• Drive partner activation and training with sales and marketing teams.

• Track partner funnel, payouts, reconciliation and customer experience.

• Ensure partner conduct and data use comply with approved standards.

• Set functional direction and operating rhythm.

• Own governance, resource priorities and capability building.

• Sponsor policy, process and technology interventions.

Key Decisions / Dimensions

• Make day-to-day decisions within approved policy, process, budget and delegated authority.

• Escalate policy deviations, material customer impact, fraud indicators, compliance concerns and unresolved cross-functional dependencies.

• Numeric sanction, commercial, hiring and budget authorities are to be defined in the approved delegation matrix.

Key interactions

Internal Sales, Product, Credit/Underwriting, Risk, Operations, RCU/Fraud Control, Collections, Legal, Compliance, Finance, Technology, HR and COE, as relevant.

External Students, co-applicants, universities, education consultants, DSAs, verification agencies, valuers, legal partners, technology/service partners and other approved vendors, as relevant.

Major Challenges

• Balancing growth, customer experience, turnaround time and portfolio quality.

• Managing incomplete or inconsistent customer, academic, financial and collateral information.

• Coordinating multiple stakeholders and technology/process dependencies across the loan lifecycle.

• Maintaining control discipline during policy, market and process changes.

Required Qualifications and Experience

Postgraduate or equivalent professional qualification preferred, with substantial leadership experience in lending or the stated function.

Critical skills and knowledge

• Key-account management

• Commercial negotiation

• Education ecosystem knowledge

• Business planning

• Stakeholder management

• Excel / presentation / business MIS capability appropriate to the role

• High standards of integrity, customer confidentiality and control discipline