The story of Fairlo began when our founders, Jimmy and Shamon, saw first-hand how unfair and predatory lending practices can trap people in cycles of debt. Their mother had been misled by a large bank, and instead of being offered a lifeline, she was pushed further into financial difficulties. That injustice sparked something: to build a company that reimagines credit, rooted in transparency, flexibility and respect.
That company became Fairlo.
Since launching in 2018, Fairlo has helped tens of thousands of customers access responsible credit when life happens. With approximately 50,000 active users, a 4.8 Trustpilot rating from 4,200+ reviews and an incredibly low churn rate, we are proving that transparency and flexibility are not only the right things to do. They are a winning model.
We are a tight team of around 50 people based in Stockholm, Crete and the UK. Backed by some of Sweden’s most experienced investors and driven by a culture built on kindness, courage, collaboration and common sense, we are very proud of where we are today.
Our international setup means legal questions span financial regulation, corporate governance, commercial agreements, products, technology, data protection and everything in between.
We are now entering the most exciting chapter in our journey so far. Fairlo is becoming a bank. This will allow us to drive innovation, scale responsibly, expand our offering and create fair and transparent financial products that support our customers throughout different stages of their lives. Becoming a bank also means raising the bar when it comes to governance, legal risk and regulatory requirements. We need a legal framework that is robust enough for a bank, while remaining pragmatic enough for a fast-moving and entrepreneurial organisation.
At the same time we are going through a second transformation. Fairlo is becoming an AI-native company, where AI is part of how we think, work, solve problems and improve. These two shifts are not in conflict. Done properly, they reinforce each other: better systems make a stronger bank, and a stronger bank needs better systems.
That is where you come in.
As Head of Legal, you will be Fairlo’s senior legal expert and take ownership of the legal function as we transition into becoming a bank.
Reporting directly to our CEO, you will work closely with the Board, Executive Crew and teams across Fairlo, providing pragmatic legal advice and making sure our governance, decision-making and legal framework meet the standards expected of a regulated bank.
You will also hold the role of SUB (Särskilt utsedd befattningshavare) and carry an important responsibility for Fairlo’s work to prevent money laundering and terrorist financing.
This makes the role broader than a traditional in-house legal position. You will move between strategic advice to the CEO and Board, corporate governance, financial regulation and AML/CTF, while staying close enough to the business to review an agreement, support a new product or solve an everyday legal challenge.
Our head of legal will be someone who is interested in leveraging AI to make the business operate more efficiently, and creating systems which empower the rest of the business to move fast in a compliant, defensible way.
We want Legal involved early. Understanding the business, challenging when needed, and most importantly being solutions focussed to gain competitive advantages that allow us to excel responsibly.
Most legal functions work like a queue. A question arrives, a lawyer answers it, and everything else waits. That model puts a ceiling on how fast a company can move, and it puts one person in the middle of every decision.
Something changed in the last two years, and we think it changes this role completely. A lawyer with good judgment can now build working systems. Not specify them and wait, but actually build them, with their own hands and in days rather than budget cycles. That single change turns the most experienced legal mind in a company from the person who answers the questions into the person who builds the thing that answers them.
That is the role we are hiring for. We believe the best legal function is the one that makes most legal work happen without a lawyer in the middle of it. The way there is to build systems that carry the work: systems that answer the recurring questions, do the first pass, hold the compliant path open, and escalate only what genuinely needs your judgment. Your time should go to the decisions that deserve it, and to building the machinery that handles everything else.
This is the same shift our engineering team is making, and it runs through the whole company. We are looking for a Head of Legal who wants to do exactly that for legal.
To be clear about what this means. The bar stays exactly where it is, and a machine decides nothing that matters. In a regulated bank accountability stays human, and for a great deal of it, accountability stays with you. What changes is how much unnecessary work sits between a good decision and getting it done.
- Build, not brief. We expect you to ship working tools. If you can describe what Fairlo needs, you can now build it yourself, and we will give you the access, the room and the support to do it.
- Put agents on the work instead of documents in a folder. The interesting question is what a system can do end to end. An agent that reviews every inbound agreement against our positions, drafts the redlines and the reply, and escalates only the clauses outside mandate. An agent that reads our entire contract estate and tells us what we have actually committed to, what renews when, and where we have quietly taken contradictory positions.
- Make regulatory change land where it belongs. Build a system that takes a change from Finansinspektionen, the UK FCA, the EBA or the EU, maps it to the exact policy paragraph, process, product screen and control it touches, and puts the work in front of the right person with a draft amendment already attached.
- Keep the golden thread intact, continuously. Board decision to policy to instruction to process to evidence. That chain is what a supervisor actually examines, and it is usually reconstructed by hand under pressure. Build it so it is checked continuously and can be produced on demand.
- Red-team us before anyone else does. Run adversarial reviews against our own governance framework, contracts and processes. Simulate a supervisory examination, a dispute, a complaint escalation, and find the weak links while they are still cheap to fix. This is newly possible, and we think it is one of the places we can get genuinely ahead.
- Turn your judgment into infrastructure. Every call you make should teach the system, so that the fiftieth version of the same question does not need you at all. Your expertise should compound inside the company rather than be dispensed one answer at a time.
- Legal in the flow of work. Answers where decisions are actually made, in Slack, in the product, in the pipeline, at the moment someone needs them, grounded in our own governance framework and our own approved positions rather than the open internet.
- Compliance by construction. Work with Tech so that requirements like pre-contract information, APR presentation and consent are enforced by the pipeline rather than reviewed after the fact. The compliant path should also be the easiest path.
- Measure the right things. How much legal work gets done well without you. How fast the rest moves. How much of our framework we could evidence on demand if someone asked tomorrow.
- Act as the primary legal advisor to the CEO, Board and Executive Crew across corporate law, financial services regulation, commercial agreements, data protection, outsourcing and other relevant legal matters.
- Make sure Fairlo’s corporate governance framework, decision-making structures, Board documentation and corporate formalities meet applicable legal and regulatory requirements.
- Own the legal perspective of Fairlo’s internal governance framework, including policies, instructions and guidelines, and keep the thread from Board decision to policy to process intact and evidenced.
- Own group and subsidiary governance, intragroup agreements, related-party transactions and conflicts of interest.
- Monitor legal and regulatory developments and translate them into clear, practical implications for the business.
- Support new products, partnerships and strategic initiatives through legal advice and risk assessments.
- Draft, review and negotiate commercial agreements, and manage external legal counsel when specialist expertise is needed.
As Fairlo’s SUB, you will have a central role in making sure the bank meets its obligations to prevent money laundering and terrorist financing. You will:
- Oversee Fairlo’s AML/CTF framework, processes and controls, and follow up that agreed measures are implemented across the organisation.
- Own and regularly update the general AML/CTF risk assessment.
- Make sure appropriate processes are in place for customer risk classification, customer due diligence and transaction monitoring.
- Make sure Fairlo has sufficient resources, systems, processes and controls to manage its AML/CTF risks effectively.
- Report regularly to the Board on AML/CTF risks, activities, material deficiencies, incidents and required actions.
- Take responsibility for relevant periodic AML/CTF reporting to Finansinspektionen.
- Act as Fairlo's Sanctions Responsible (sanktionsansvarig): own the sanctions exposure assessment and screening framework, report to the Board and FI on sanctions matters, and ensure PEP and sanctions screening operate effectively.
We expect AI to change how a lot of this work gets done, from triaging alerts and preparing cases to keeping the general risk assessment alive rather than annual. We also expect you to be clear-eyed about where it cannot be used, how decisions stay explainable and auditable, and how you would defend every choice to Finansinspektionen. The tooling can change. The accountability does not.
Becoming an AI-native bank raises real legal questions, and you will own them:
- How we use AI on personal data, and the legal basis for doing so.
- Where our use cases sit under the EU AI Act, especially anything close to creditworthiness assessment, and what that requires of us in practice.
- Confidentiality, data processing agreements and vendor risk when we use external models.
- Automated decision-making, transparency, and the rights our customers have.
- Making it possible for the rest of Fairlo to move fast with AI without us getting it wrong.
You will combine strategic responsibility with hands-on execution, building legal processes and governance that are robust, clear and scalable, without unnecessary bureaucracy. You will work closely with Compliance and Risk while maintaining a clear division of responsibilities between Legal as part of the first line and our independent second-line control functions. As Fairlo grows, you will shape how the Legal function develops, and what capabilities we will need. We would rather you build leverage than headcount.
- A Swedish law degree (juristexamen) or equivalent legal qualification.
- At least 5 years of relevant experience from an in-house legal function or law firm, with a focus on banking, financial services or another regulated environment.
- Strong knowledge of corporate and commercial law, financial services regulation and AML/CTF legislation.
- Experience with corporate governance and legal documentation within the financial sector.
- Experience advising senior management and working directly with Boards.
- Strong commercial judgement and the ability to translate complex legal and regulatory requirements into clear, practical advice.
- Hands-on experience using AI in legal work, and honest judgement about where it helps, where it does not, and where it is not allowed.
- You have built something with AI that other people now use. Tell us what it was, what it replaced, and what broke along the way.
- The confidence and integrity to challenge when needed, while remaining pragmatic and solution-oriented.
- Excellent communication skills in Swedish and English.
- The ability to work independently, take ownership and prioritise in a fast-moving environment.
- Working within a bank or credit institution regulated by Finansinspektionen.
- Acting as SUB or holding another senior AML/CTF responsibility.
- Regulatory applications, authorisation processes and interaction with Finansinspektionen or other supervisory authorities.
- Have knowledge or experience from UK regulation and consumer credit acts.
- Consumer credit regulation, data protection, technology or outsourcing.
- AI governance, the EU AI Act, model risk or algorithmic accountability.
- Legal operations, contract lifecycle management, automation or building internal tooling.
- Working across multiple jurisdictions.
- Building or developing an in-house legal function.
- Being part of building the financial world you would like to live in.
- Significant ownership and the opportunity to build the legal and governance foundation of a new bank.
- Working closely with our CEO, founders, Executive Leadership Team and Board.
- Health insurance, pension at ITP level and a health and wellness allowance.
- 30 days of vacation per year plus klämdagar off.
- The possibility to use the Fairlo Cretan house for both work and vacation stays.
- The possibility of bike leasing.
- A hybrid working model with a top-location office in Stockholm.
- Being part of a team that supports one another, has fun together and thrives.
You will mainly work from our Stockholm office, collaborating closely with colleagues across Fairlo. As an international organisation, you may also travel to our teams and offices in Greece, the UK and other locations as we continue to grow.
We believe in finding people with unique backgrounds and perspectives who want to challenge established ways of doing things. If you are excited by the opportunity to combine law, governance, AML and business, and to help build a bank where fairness, transparency and flexibility are built into everything we do, we would love to hear from you.
