The Student Lending SME will play a pivotal role in driving the transformation and optimization of student-loan products, servicing platforms, and operational capabilities within financial institutions. This individual will provide strategic insights into the full student-loan lifecycle — from origination through servicing and repayment—leveraging deep expertise in lending operations, regulatory compliance, legacy system migration, and customer-experience design.
Responsibilities- Lead modernization initiatives of student-loan servicing platforms: assess legacy codebases, map migration paths (on-prem → cloud), and oversee refactoring or re-engineering efforts.
- Define the business capabilities and customer journeys for student loan origination, servicing, repayment (including deferment, forbearance, and income-driven repayment), and any special servicing workflows.
- Translate business objectives into functional specifications, partnering with architects/engineers to ensure solution delivery across workstreams (product, IT, operations, and compliance).
- Conduct financial analyses, risk assessments, regulatory reviews, and operational readiness audits specifically for student-loan products (e.g., compliance with federal/state regulations, servicing standards, reporting requirements).
- Partner with cross-functional teams (product, operations, IT, legal/compliance, customer experience) to ensure business goals, systems capabilities, and compliance frameworks are aligned and integrated into the operating model.
Required Experience- 5+ years of experience in student lending or consumer/education lending, ideally within financial institutions or fintechs undergoing transformation of servicing/loan platforms.
- Strong working knowledge of the student-loan lifecycle (origination, servicing, repayment, default resolution, refinancing) and relevant regulatory frameworks (federal & state) and servicing standards.
- Proven ability to lead stakeholder management
- Demonstrated expertise in legacy system modernization, cloud platforms (AWS preferred), and an enterprise-architecture vantage point.
- Hands-on experience with SQL.
- Familiarity with Oracle or similar enterprise data stacks
- Comfort with data engineering concepts in a financial services context.
- Solid understanding of compliance and risk analytics in lending (incl. loan conversion projects, servicing system replacements, data-migration risk, audit readiness).
- Excellent communication skills and ability to convey complex technical/operational concepts to both business and IT audiences.
- Track record of leading technology initiatives — e.g., loan-servicing system replacements, platform rollout, servicing conversion, cloud migration, or legacy carve-outs.
Preferred Experience- Experience working in a regulated environment (e.g., US federal student loans, private-student-loan market).
- Familiarity with digital onboarding and customer-experience design for lending products.
- Experience managing vendor relationships (servicers, technology platform providers, data-migration partners).
- Ability to build and interpret key metrics (e.g., loan-servicing cost per account, servicing turnaround times, borrower default/rehabilitation rates, data-migration error rates).