Ko mātou tēnei | This is Us 

The Business Lending domain within BNZ Customer, Products and Services (CP&S) is an exciting and driven work environment where you'll get to maintain and develop market leading products, services and customer propositions.  

You’ll also get to be heavily involved in substantial transformation initiatives to replace legacy lending systems and product platforms, which will provide a critical foundation for BNZ to continue to grow and innovate as New Zealand’s largest business bank. 

The role is responsible for ensuring BNZ’s business term loan products are managed strategically to optimise financial performance, and ensure that products remain fit for purpose, meeting our customer's current and future needs.   

Reporting to the Portfolio Manager - Business Lending, you'll be part of a tīma that is critical to how BNZ turns up for NZ businesses from the smallest small business to the largest institutional client. 

Mō te Tūranga | About the Role 

We spoke with our Head of Product – Business Lending, and he let us know the following about the tūranga (role):  

This is a permanent, full time opportunity based in Auckland. It is a hybrid role with three days in the office and two days where you can work flexibly.  

What are the day to day tasks the person in this role will complete? 

• Apply strong product management, design, development and leadership skills to support BNZ’s strategy for business term lending products, automation and processes. 

• Provide subject matter expertise for business term lending products, focusing on customer, functional, commercial and risk performance, and ensuring products and processes are compliant by design. 

• Understand the business, agribusiness and commercial property lending market, identify customer needs and opportunities, and support the Portfolio Manager to deliver market-leading product designs and propositions. 

• Manage risks, events, findings and treatment plans promptly, and complete product reviews as required. 

• Effectively leads and communicates product change initiatives (both internally and externally). 

• Own assigned products’ operational performance, governance and service health, ensuring incidents, risks, issues, controls, remediations and customer impacts are well managed and continuously improved. 

• Prioritise operational, transformational, regulatory, risk and technology work to balance business outcomes, customer needs and service resilience, focusing resources on the highest-value outcomes. 

• Lead across Product, Technology, Operations, Risk and Delivery teams, clarifying responsibilities, influencing decisions and coordinating stakeholders to maintain stable, compliant and effective product services. 

 What is your favourite thing about working for BNZ?  

The people and culture, and the values that underpin that, which are demonstrated every day in the way we work together to support each other to be at our best. 

What attributes will this person display to be successful in this role?  

You’ll bring demonstrated product management experience in a complex environment, with strong capability across operational governance, incident management, stakeholder leadership, backlog prioritisation, risk management and technology partnerships. You’ll be comfortable using data to inform decisions, assess product performance, validate system outcomes and identify opportunities for continuous improvement. Experience using analytical and AI-enabled tools is highly desirable. 

You will also have:  

• 3+ years experience in relevant lending, product development/management, projects, or technology delivery environment. 

• A passion for solving real customer problems, with experience using various methods to elicit and document customers’ and stakeholders’ requirements and delivery of these to market. 

• Strong influencing and stakeholder management skills. 

• Exceptional communication skills, high level of attention to detail and strong written skills. 

• Skilled in financial analysis and business case development. 

• Ability to identify risks, mitigate and gain decisions quickly. 

Desirable: 

• Experience with Business Lending products (ideally including Business Term Loan products such as CARL, CCAF, Business First Term Loan or Project Plus). 

• Experience with system implementations or re-platforming.