About Ayan

Ayan Capital is a UK fintech founded by the team behind Alif Bank, which serves 10 million customers and processes more than $1 billion in transactions every month.

We started with FCA-regulated halal car finance.

Since then, we've launched AyanCare, our breakdown protection product, and we're now launching AyanPay, a deferred credit product. We've also recently closed a £75m funding line.

Our next major product is business banking. Beyond that, we're building towards something much bigger: a global financial company that can last for generations.

The role

We're looking for someone to build our business banking business from zero.

You won't inherit a roadmap.

You'll work out what we should launch first, who we should build it for, how the economics should work, which infrastructure and partners we need, and how to get the first version into customers' hands.

Then you'll make it grow.

You'll work directly with the founders and have unusually high ownership from day one.

What you'll own

• Decide what we launch first: accounts, payments, cards, financing, or something else
• Understand the customer deeply and identify the wedge that gives us the right to win
• Work with engineering, risk and compliance to take the product from idea to live
• Select and manage the infrastructure and external partners required to launch
• Own volume, revenue, margin and unit economics
• Talk to customers constantly and use what you learn to iterate
• Build the early team around the product
• Eventually turn the initial product into a much larger business

Who we're looking for

We care much more about trajectory than years of experience.

You might already work in product. You might be a founder, engineer, consultant, banker, operator or something else entirely.

What matters is evidence that you:

• Learn unusually quickly
• Take ownership without waiting to be told what to do
• Can turn ambiguous problems into concrete decisions
• Have built or shipped difficult things
• Think commercially, not just about features
• Are comfortable making decisions with incomplete information
• Move quickly without becoming careless
• Can go deep when the problem requires it
• Have extremely high standards for yourself and the people around you

You do not need to have spent ten years in banking.

You do need to be capable of learning enough about banking, payments, regulation and financial infrastructure to make good decisions quickly.

AI

We expect everyone at Ayan to use AI seriously.

Not occasionally for rewriting emails.

We mean using it to research markets, analyse data, prototype products, automate repetitive work, write code, challenge your thinking and multiply what a small team can accomplish.

We will want to see how you use it.

Useful, but not required

Experience in any of the following would help:

• Fintech
• SME banking
• Payments
• Lending
• Financial infrastructure
• Early-stage startups
• Building something from zero
• Founding a company — including one that didn't work

None is a prerequisite.

Exceptional people often haven't done the exact job before.

What this role is not

This isn't a role for someone who wants to manage a backlog handed to them.

There won't be a large organisation around you, a perfectly defined strategy, or months to prepare a recommendation.

You'll be expected to understand the problem, make decisions and move.

Practical details

• Full-time
• London office, five days a week
• Competitive salary + meaningful equity
• Direct access to the founders
• Significant responsibility from the start

Hiring process

1. Intro conversation

A short conversation about what you've done, what you're unusually good at and what you want to build.

2. Founder deep-dive

We'll go deeply into things you've built, decisions you've made and situations where you had to figure something out without a playbook.

3. Working session

We'll give you a real Ayan problem.

We care less about whether you already know the answer and more about how quickly you understand the problem, identify what matters and get to a good decision.

4. Offer

One final thing

Don't self-select out because you haven't worked in business banking before.

If your career has moved unusually quickly, you've repeatedly been given more responsibility than expected, or you've built things you weren't obviously qualified to build, we'd like to hear from you.