FinCrime Operations Senior Lead - Sanctions

As a Financial Crime Operations Senior Lead, you will be responsible for developing and managing a team of Financial Crime Operations Team Leads and Specialists for specific SME areas. Your key objective is to ensure the effective assessment and mitigation of risks related to high-risk customers, while strictly adhering to AML/CFT regulations and aligning with Wise’s risk appetite and internal policies. The specialists on your team will possess an in-depth understanding of the unique risks associated with complex business structures, varied customer types and activities, and country-specific challenges, as well as the strategies required to mitigate these risks effectively.

In this leadership role, you will act as a vital connector between your operational team, which includes team leads and specialists, and Wise's senior leadership. This involves clearly communicating the overarching strategic objectives to your team and transforming these goals into actionable and pertinent directives that drive process optimization and performance improvement.

You'll be instrumental in aligning Wise’s overall mission and strategy with performance expectations, ensuring that your team’s efforts are efficiently strategized and executed for optimal success. This includes developing and owning a strategic roadmap spanning several quarters your team, enhancing processes, and cultivating a positive and empowering work environment. You will support your team’s growth and independence through comprehensive training, mentoring, coaching, delegation, and recognition.

As an experienced operations manager, you will design and implement customer-focused processes while maintaining a vigilant awareness of the risks inherent in the financial industry, specific product offerings, and regulatory requirements. Your approach will ensure that Wise's operations continually meet the expectations of our partners and regulatory bodies.

Job Responsibilities

• Leadership and people development: Drive team performance and cultural excellence to support sustainable business growth. Lead by example, demonstrating values and work ethic that inspire accountability, proactive problem-solving, and a growth mindset. Manage and develop a high-performing team by role modeling success behaviors. Focus on cultivating a high-performance culture through talent development, career check-ins, and recommendations for growth. Build strong teams by hiring, coaching, and fostering skills and competencies. Promote continuous improvement, knowledge sharing, and inclusion to empower your team to innovate and excel.

• Performance management: Foster a culture of excellence in your team by consistently meeting KPIs and SLAs in our metrics-driven environment. Refresh performance expectations to match business needs and address underperformance with clear action plans. Implement strong performance frameworks, provide actionable feedback, and ensure every team member operates efficiently.

• Operational management: In this role, you'll turn high-level plans into actionable changes and lead your team to success. You'll create phased implementation plans to minimize disruption and set clear metrics to track progress. Focus on optimizing team structure by managing recruitment and strategically placing staff. Continuously identify and address redundancies and inefficiencies. You'll develop scalable, compliant processes and collaborate with product and operational teams to enhance customer experience, boost automation, and meet financial and service goals. Strong data literacy is essential for analyzing complex data and making informed decisions. Governance is crucial; you'll escalate issues promptly, provide clear updates to senior leadership, and contribute to a customer-focused culture that balances regulatory objectives with excellent customer service.

• Quality assurance: Ensure the highest quality standards for your group's tasks by making decisions within established frameworks. Lead root cause analysis, turn insights into improvements, and mitigate risks. Ensure quality standards are integrated into processes, tools, and initiatives. Understand impacts, focus on findings, and propose actions for better outcomes. Collaborate with other functions, offering expertise to enhance processes and elevate quality across the team and organization.

• Domain knowledge and expertise: Be a subject matter expert in Financial Crime areas with the ability to train and coach your team. Maintain a comprehensive understanding of our regulatory obligations and internal policies. Apply a risk-based approach to deterring and preventing money laundering and financial crime. Be able to represent the operational team processes and policies when working with internal auditing and testing parties.  Retain an understanding of the wider Financial Crime and regulatory landscape and take on best practices to your team. Own operational incident management: from initial detection to response and remediation. Liaise effectively with functions and stakeholders, ensuring clear and timely communication throughout. Be responsible for developing action plans, driving remediation efforts, and providing context and subject matter expertise during and after incidents. The Senior Lead supports product-related incident management, ensuring a response to all critical events.

• Project management: Effectively Lead projects from start to finish, prioritizing tasks and maintaining documentation. Communicate milestones, address blockers, and delegate tasks while monitoring progress. Articulate project impact and value, and engage with stakeholders from technical teams to senior management. Negotiate and influence cross-functional teams to drive momentum and align with strategic goals.

• Planning and execution: Ensure operational area plans are set in place and provide insights to other stakeholders. Take full accountability in delivering, updating and making sure your area is making progress on their goals by measuring the effectiveness of the output of the team. There is a clear strategy within your domain that is connected with the wider organisational key objectives, including impactful OKRs and goals based on these plans, and being able to confidently present plans to varied audiences. 

• Stakeholder management and communication: Lead complex projects with multiple stakeholders, setting priorities and ensuring timely delivery. Partner with Product to support group objectives and advocate for customer success. Manage diverse relationships, anticipate issues, and share key insights. Engage stakeholders promptly and lead discussions effectively. Communicate clearly and tailor messages to the audience, using data to deliver impactful and concise messages. Adapt to diverse stakeholders with confidence, ensuring professional and effective interactions.

Qualifications

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills in English, with the ability to produce clear, concise, accurate, and professional reports, summaries, and customer communications. Additional languages are a plus.

• 3-4 years of experience in areas such as Know Your Customer (KYC)/AML, financial crime, compliance, or a related field within financial services.

• At least 3 years of experience leading small to medium-sized teams.

• Advanced understanding of the regulatory framework surrounding KYC, FinCrime, regulatory or operational compliance.

• You are familiar with money laundering methods and other financial crime trends. You proactively stay informed on industry best practices and emerging threats, understanding what other businesses are doing and anticipating changes on the horizon. Crucially, you can translate these external insights into Wise's specific needs, ensuring our strategies and defenses remain robust and forward-looking.

• Strong understanding of the regulatory framework governing financial services, coupled with the ability to interpret guidances and regulatory changes, translating their direct impact into our business operations and strategic needs

• You can build and maintain an environment where your team is incentivised to make decisions and apply a risk-based approach to their work. This involves the ability to guide the team on the right course or course-correcting swiftly when necessary, ensuring resources and focus are directed towards the most impactful and business-crucial items.

• You are punctual, independent, proactive and willing to get things done.

• You have excellent communication and interpersonal skills, coupled with strong organizational abilities and great time management. You thrive in a fast-paced, high-pressure environment, comfortable rapidly switching between topics and problem spaces, and adept at navigating a continuously changing operational landscape.

• Experience with forecasting and strategically moving team metrics.

• Ability to recognise and proactively resolve recurring issues and streamline processes while working collaboratively with business departments and stakeholders.

• A strong process-oriented and efficiency-driven mindset.

• Strong organizational and project management skills, with experience in creating and managing project plans.

• Robust problem-solving capabilities with a focus on actionable, scalable and impactful solutions.

• Strong organizational ability and time management skills. Highly punctual, independent, proactive and demonstrates strong self-leadership.

• You are capable of identifying gaps in policies and processes and providing detailed feedback, including examples when possible, through the established communication channels. This includes the ability to timely escalate critical issues, clearly articulate complex problems and write out comprehensive problem statements for effective resolution.

• Proven track record of taking individual ownership and responsibilities as well as being a great team-player. Ability to deliver constructive, well-evidenced feedback that drives tangible behavioral change and performance improvement.

• Can work with tight deadlines under pressure whilst maintaining high level of quality and competency.

• Ability to independently analyze and move the team’s metrics without external support, driving them in the correct direction with ambitious targets. This requires a good understanding of what impacts and influences different metrics, coupled with proactive capability to anticipate, address and communicate solutions for blockers to ensure continuous progress.

Nice to have:

• Education: Bachelor’s degree in Finance, Business Administration, Law, or related field.

• Certifications: ICA, CAMS, or equivalent certification (EDD/AML/fraud/risk/fincrime/screening focused).

• Experience in using Business Intelligence tools such as Looker, Superset, Redash or Microtab. 

Additional Information

For everyone, everywhere. We're people building money without borders  — without judgement or prejudice, too. We believe teams are strongest when they are diverse, equitable and inclusive.

We're proud to have a truly international team, and we celebrate our differences.
Inclusive teams help us live our values and make sure every Wiser feels respected, empowered to contribute towards our mission and able to progress in their careers.

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