Hire a head of credit risk who reads your book, not just the category

An empty credit risk seat is a policy decision nobody is making

When the head-of-credit-risk seat is open, the book does not stop moving. Underwriting exceptions pile up without an owner, limit reviews slip, and provisioning calls get made by people a level too junior to carry them. None of it shows on a dashboard until a cohort turns, and by then the cost is in the portfolio rather than the salary line. The seat is rarely urgent until it is very urgent, which is the worst moment to appoint the person who will set your appetite.

What makes the search slow is not a thin market. It is that credit risk splits hard by the book a leader has actually run. Someone who has priced unsecured retail lending lives in a different world from one who has run wholesale or secured exposure, and a bank credit function carries a different cadence and governance from an NBFC's. A candidate can be genuinely excellent against one book and misjudge yours in the first portfolio review. A shortlist screened on the title hides that difference entirely.

We work only in financial services, so we screen on the lending model, not the label. Before a profile reaches you, someone who understands the difference between a retail NBFC's loss curve and a bank's wholesale exposure has formed and written a view on whether this person will hold up against your book.

What we screen for in a credit risk leader

The book they have owned, not observed. We separate leaders who have set appetite and carried the loss outcome from those who have supported a policy written above them. For a seat that moves the P&L, that distinction is the assessment.

Judgment across the cycle. Anyone can tighten in a downturn. We probe for decisions made when growth and caution pulled against each other, because that is the real test of a risk leader and the one a benign few years can hide.

Fluency at the risk and data join. Modern credit risk runs on scorecards, early-warning signals and model governance. We look for leaders who can challenge a model rather than defer to it, without pretending the judgment call is the model's to make.

Standing with the business. A risk head who only says no is routed around. We assess whether a candidate has held the line while keeping the lending engine moving, and whether the board has actually listened to them.

What credit risk leadership pays in India

Offers for credit risk roles move with the book, the institution type and whether the seat carries model governance and board exposure. We publish current compensation so an offer can be built on live numbers rather than a stale survey.

See the credit risk salary benchmarks for ranges by level, and the technology risk benchmarks for the adjacent control seat. The wider picture sits on banking and NBFC hiring and in what a vacant senior risk seat costs a lender.