Cristina Rodriguez

Biography

My career has been built around a consistent theme: stepping into complex operations, bringing clarity to what isn’t working, and building the people, processes, and performance systems that create measurable results. Over the past 15+ years, I’ve led operations across higher education, fintech, consumer finance, customer experience, and revenue operations. My experience spans the full operational lifecycle—from customer acquisition and enrollment through financing, billing, accounts receivable, collections, servicing, and customer success. That breadth has given me a unique ability to see beyond individual functions and understand how decisions in one part of an organization affect customers, employees, revenue, and business performance downstream. Most recently, as Director of Global Consumer Finance Operations at General Assembly, I led complex B2C and B2G finance operations supporting customers across multiple programs and financing models. My responsibilities included accounts receivable, revenue operations, financing programs, enrollment operations, collections oversight, forecasting, KPI development, process improvement, and partner governance. A significant part of my work has involved transforming operations that needed greater structure, visibility, or scalability. I led a $42M accounts receivable remediation initiative, helped reduce A/R by $10M year over year, and managed the transition of more than 1,200 accounts representing approximately $23M to an external partner. I also developed forecasting and KPI frameworks, standardized operating procedures, strengthened vendor and BPO governance, and created operating cadences that gave leaders better visibility into performance and risk. But the numbers are only part of my story. I am fundamentally a people and operations leader. I’ve led organizations of 40+ employees, developed managers and individual contributors, managed multimillion-dollar budgets, and partnered across Finance, Sales, Customer Success, Product, Technology, Compliance, and executive leadership. I’m comfortable moving between strategy and execution—whether that means presenting a performance issue to senior leaders, analyzing the data behind it, redesigning the process, or working directly with teams to make the new approach successful. My earlier experience in higher education and education finance shaped much of how I lead today. It taught me how to operate in highly regulated, customer-centered environments where financial outcomes and human outcomes are deeply connected. My subsequent work in fintech and consumer finance expanded that foundation into lending, servicing, collections, partner management, revenue operations, and large-scale operational transformation. Throughout my career, I’ve become known for asking the questions that move organizations forward: What are we trying to achieve? What does the data tell us? Where is the process breaking down? Who owns the outcome? And how do we build something that will continue to work as the organization grows? I’m now looking to bring that experience to a senior operational leadership role where I can have enterprise-level impact. I’m particularly interested in Director, Senior Director, VP, and Head-of-Operations opportunities spanning Business Operations, Customer Operations, Revenue Operations, Operational Excellence, Customer Experience, and financial services operations. What I bring is not simply experience managing operations. I bring the ability to diagnose them, transform them, and build the accountability, leadership, and operating discipline required to sustain results. At this stage of my career, that is the work I find most meaningful: helping organizations turn complexity into clarity—and clarity into measurable performance.