FinCrime Operations Senior Lead - PEP & Adverse Media

As a FinCrime Operations Senior Lead your mission is to ensure the effective assessment and mitigation of financial crime risks across operations. You will act as a vital connector between operational teams and senior leadership, transforming strategic objectives into actionable directives. Your leadership will prioritize customer focus, regulatory compliance, and sustained operational excellence across multiple specialized teams.

Key Responsibilities

Executive Leadership & People Development:

• Lead by example, cultivating a high-performance, results-driven culture across multiple Team Leads and Specialists.

• Own the talent pipeline: hire, coach, mentor, and develop direct reports, driving career check-ins, skill enhancement, and making recommendations for promotions/salary progression.

• Implement strong performance frameworks to consistently meet and enhance individual and team KPIs/SLAs, promptly addressing and documenting underperformance.

Strategic Planning & Operational Governance:

• Own the strategic roadmap (spanning several quarters) for your operational area, transforming high-level plans into actionable change.

• Lead and manage projects from start to finish, driving momentum, delegating tasks, and articulating project impact and value to cross-functional stakeholders.

• Ensure highest quality standards and compliance are maintained across all tasks, leading root cause analysis and turning insights into improvements.

Risk Mitigation & Domain Expertise:

• Serve as the Subject Matter Expert (SME) in Financial Crime areas, training and coaching your leadership team.

• Be responsible for developing and driving action plans for operational incident management, detection, response, and remediation.

• Maintain accountability for escalating critical incidents, high-risk customers, and systemic control weaknesses to senior leadership in a timely and precise manner.

Stakeholder Management & Influence:

• Lead complex projects with multiple, diverse stakeholders (Product, Engineering, Compliance, Senior Management).

• Negotiate and influence cross-functional teams to drive momentum toward strategic goals.

• Communicate clearly and confidently, tailoring messages to the audience and using data to deliver impactful and concise updates.

Qualifications:

We are seeking a seasoned leader who combines strategic people management with deep FinCrime expertise to ensure operational governance across our specialized teams.

• Experience: At least 3-4 years of experience in FinCrime, KYC/AML, or compliance, with at least 3 years leading small to medium-sized teams.

• Performance Development: Proven track record of delivering constructive, well-evidenced feedback that drives tangible behavioral change and performance improvement.

• Advanced Domain Knowledge: Strong understanding of the FinCrime regulatory framework (PEP, Adverse Media, Sanctions, KYC, AML, FinCrime). Must be able to translate external industry insights and regulatory changes into robust strategies for Wise.

• Metric Ownership: Experience with forecasting and strategically moving team metrics, coupled with the ability to independently analyze and drive metric improvement.

• Process Efficiency: Highly process-oriented and efficiency-driven mindset; able to recognize and proactively resolve recurring issues and streamline processes.

• Resilience & Quality: Must be able to work with tight deadlines under pressure while maintaining a high level of quality and competence.

• Communication & Self-Leadership: Excellent verbal and written English skills. Highly punctual, independent, proactive, and thrives in a fast-paced environment, comfortable rapidly switching between topics.

Nice to Have

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

• Certifications: ICA, CAMS, or equivalent FinCrime/Risk certification.

• Tools: Experience using Business Intelligence tools such as Looker, Superset, or Microtab.

If you are interested in the position, please apply by submitting your CV and Cover Letter in English.

(You can include your cover letter into the "Message to the Hiring Team" section).

In your Cover Letter, please answer the following questions:

1. Describe how you built and led a high-performing Financial Crime operations team (including team leads and specialists). How did you hire, coach, and address underperformance, and what KPIs/SLAs did you improve? Please quantify the outcomes.
2. Share an example where you designed and scaled a risk-based process for high-risk or complex customers. How did you balance regulatory requirements with customer experience, leverage data/automation, and measure quality and efficiency gains?

Internal Hiring Guidelines can be found Other Benefits

Role Timeline:

This position remains open until we have identified sufficient strong candidates.

When to expect a response:

We aim to respond to all applicants as quickly as possible. However, due to high application volumes, there may be some delays. Here are our expected review timeframes:

• CV & Cover Letter Review - 2 working days

• Recruiment ScreeeningFirst/Second/Final Interview - 5 working days

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