In conversation with... Hardev Tumber

What was your journey to your role today? Would you say it’s been a typical career path?

Definitely not typical, though perhaps inevitable in hindsight. I grew up around a family video rental business and got my first taste of collections recovering late fees, an early introduction to the awkward but necessary art of asking people for money they owe.

From there, I moved into public sector collections before joining one of the UK’s largest debt purchasers during the global financial crisis. Over the years, I built experience across collections, legal recovery, enforcement, and credit risk before moving into fintech.

Today, I lead collections and credit product initiatives, designing systems and strategies that support millions of customers globally. While the technology has changed dramatically, the core challenge remains the same: helping customers resolve debt in a way that balances commercial outcomes, customer experience, and regulatory expectations.

If you weren’t working in credit and financial services, what would you be doing?

Somewhere in the travel industry. Travel is a serious passion, and if financial services hadn’t got there first, I think I’d have found a way to make that a career. There’s probably a connection there. Building credit products means constantly entering unfamiliar territory, new markets, new customer behaviours, new failure modes, and figuring out how to make something work. Travel appeals for exactly the same reason. 

What is something that not many people know about you?

How much I travel. Since 2021 I’ve taken over 50 trips across five continents, mostly beach and city breaks, somewhere warm with a good sunset. Most people who know me professionally would probably be surprised by how much time outside work I spend planning the next trip.

What is the most significant challenge facing the credit / financial services industry today?

AI and automation are genuinely transforming operational possibilities: you can now handle customer communications, arrears management, and monitor vulnerability identification at a scale and speed that wasn’t conceivable five years ago. But the regulatory environment (Consumer Duty, FCA expectations around vulnerable customers, CONC obligations) hasn’t slowed down either. The risk is that firms chase the efficiency gains from AI without doing the hard work of ensuring those systems are compliant, fair, and genuinely serving customers in difficulty. Getting that balance right isn’t just a compliance issue. It is a reputational and commercial one too. The firms that figure it out properly will have a significant competitive advantage.

Which session or theme at Credit Week are you most looking forward to, and why?

Naturally, the sessions around AI in collections are the ones I’m most invested in. It’s the topic I’ll be speaking on, and it’s one where I think the industry conversation is still maturing. There’s a lot of excitement about what AI can do operationally, but fewer frank conversations about the practical governance and compliance boundaries and how to implement it responsibly at scale. Beyond that, I’m genuinely interested in hearing from peers across the industry, particularly from businesses at different stages of their AI journey. Credit Week is one of the few events where you get that cross-sector breadth in one room.

What trend or development are you excited about in the credit / financial services sector?

I see the most transformative potential right now in AI-powered decisioning and customer engagement across the credit lifecycle. Not just the cost reduction angle, though that’s real and significant, but the ability to personalise collections strategies at an individual level in a way that human-only operations simply cannot do at scale. Imagine a system that identifies early signs of financial difficulty, adapts its communication style to the individual, and routes the right customers to human agents at exactly the right moment, all while maintaining a full compliance audit trail. That’s not a distant future; it’s being built now. The exciting question is which organisations will build and deploy it responsibly and which will cut corners.

What do you hope to take away from Credit Week 2026?

Honest perspectives from people who are actually innovating in the credit lifecycle, not just talking about it. I’m particularly keen to understand where other credit leaders are drawing the line between automation and human intervention, and how they’re evidencing compliance to regulators when AI is making or influencing decisions. I’d also love to leave with a couple of new connections grappling with similar challenges at the product and operations interface. Some of the most valuable conversations at events like this happen in the breaks.

What advice would you give to someone starting their career in the industry?

Start in collections if you can, even if it’s not where you want to end up. It’s the part of the credit lifecycle where the consequences of everything else become visible. You learn very quickly what good underwriting looks like by seeing what happens when it goes wrong. Developing empathy for customers under financial pressure makes you a better credit professional in every subsequent role. Beyond that: get comfortable with data. Credit is a data-driven industry and that’s only accelerating. You don’t need to be a data scientist, but you do need to be able to interrogate numbers, spot anomalies, and tell a story with data to influence decisions. Those skills compound over a career in a way that few others do.

Join Hardev at Credit Week 2026!