Cruz O. Armas

• Recommend appropriate credit limits, terms, and risk ratings in line with company policy and regulatory requirements.
• Manage high‑value transactions with accuracy, control, and compliance.
• Serve as a leadership anchor for the credit team, mentoring junior and mid‑level analysts, providing training on financial analysis, underwriting standards, and regulatory expectations.
• manage escalated credit assessments, providing guidance on complex or high‑risk deals to support frontline teams.
• serve as key liaison between corporate leadership and field teams, ensuring clear communication and strategic alignment.
• Lead conference calls with dealer sales teams to deliver policy training, program updates
• Collaborate with audit, compliance, and credit administration to maintain strong credit culture and regulatory adherence.
• Built strong relationships with Franchise dealers, and community organizations to improve funding and to expand lending opportunities.

Specialty program: Exotic, Commercial vehicles Business-Indirect

• Help lead the creation and expansion of multiple underwriting pilot programs, establishing scalable processes that improved credit decisioning and operational performance.
• Played a key role in driving sustained year‑over‑year portfolio expansion
• Drove the development and growth of underwriting pilot initiatives, guiding them from initial concept to full implementation across lending operations

• Managed a team of credit analysts, ensure department achieves sales targets
• Meet with each individual CA to establish monthly goals
• Collaborate with credit administration and audit teams to ensure compliance with regulatory and internal standards
• Work on developing & training new CA's & get them up to date with the rest of the department.
• Managed a weekly schedule of projects and anticipated time line for specific milestones completions.
• Conducted presentations to upper management and executive teams for process/ workflow recommendations.
• Responsible for interviewing, selecting, training and mentoring Credit Analyst .
• Override DSS "Decision Support System" based on analytical decisions. Also illustrate reason for decision; weather it was based a combo of pay back ability plus LTV in our favor, or whatever the case may be.
• Maintain professional and satisfactory relationship with partners, This included: Daily/ weekly updates on production, also hold weekly conference calls with our biggest partners.

• Build a strong effective team by holding managers to a high standard, communicating effectively, and focusing on positive relationships with staff.
• Boosted company efficiency through technology upgrades and process improvements such as Experian, Velocify, Omegasys,The work number.
• Established operational objectives and work plans and delegated assignments to subordinate managers.
• Assist in establishing and monitoring department performance to ensure efficiency with overall operations,
• Performed all "Department Of Business Oversight" regulatory exams, responsible for 10 different DBO licensed branches, assured all licenses were under compliance and up to date with regulatory exams.
• Managed the originations manuals and ensured they were always updated with current company, state, and federal policies.
• identified inefficiencies and made recommendations for process improvements.

Credit manager (June 2008- January 2013)

- Implemented structure and organization to help stream line approval process.

- Trained new credit analyst how to read credit and crosscheck trade lines.

- Implemented approval guidelines, example: created DTI, PTI limits, to help with risk management.

- Running a high volume of credit applications, fast paced environment. 

- Manually Approve/ Turn down loan applications based collateral, credit and payback ability. After cross-referencing trade-lines, pay back ability, taking into consideration PTI, DTI & LTV.

 - In depth Credit analyzing (Experian). Review trade lines, making critical decisions based on information provided by the credit report.

- Customer service assistance with live clients. 

-Assisting customers, whether it was explaining finance charges, amortization chart or any questions in connection to their loan process

 - Reviewing promissory notes with customer at closing office; overview of the contract and explain documents such as arbitration agreement, payment instructions, power of attorney, etc..