[Hiring] Financial Crime Team Manager @Monzo

Role Description

Are you interested in leading a team at the frontline of merchant acquiring financial crime prevention? Our Financial Crime Customer Operations team is the shield of Monzo — the frontline defence protecting Monzo and our customers from fraud, money laundering, and other financial crime.

You'll play a key role by:

• Managing the personal & professional development of approximately 12 Financial Crime Business Banking – Acquiring Investigators.
• Fostering an empathetic, high-performance culture in the team.
• Providing technical coaching, feedback, and advice relating to merchant acquiring financial crime tasks (KYB, merchant due diligence, card scheme compliance, and investigations).
• Answering escalations and completing quality control across the full merchant lifecycle — onboarding, underwriting, ongoing monitoring, and offboarding.
• Analysing and driving improvement in team performance, and reporting relevant insights.
• Monitoring and maintaining service level adherence on the work completed by the team, reviewing work status and availability of your team members.
• Providing meaningful feedback to your team and ensuring learnings are taken from it.
• Communicating and embedding change within the team, driving a positive culture to help us progress as we grow.
• Contributing to a strong control environment by minimising breaches and risk events, and helping strengthen controls across our acquiring portfolio.
• Reviewing complaints attributed to the team and identifying opportunities for improvement.
• Ensuring suspicious activity, money laundering, or fraud risks identified by the team are appropriately escalated and reported to the Financial Crime Risk Team and relevant authorities.
• Conducting job interviews for financial crime investigators and contributing to hiring decisions.
• Chairing employee relations cases and making decisions consistent with Monzo's values.
• Being part of a high performing management team, supporting each other when required.

Qualifications

• Subject Matter Expert/Knowledge of Merchant Acquiring/Payment merchant services or deep knowledge of card scheme rules and onboarding for card schemes.
• Proven experience working in a KYC/B, AML, or compliance-related role within the payments industry or financial services sector.
• Strong proven background in managing a team within Financial Crime in Business Banking, with exposure to Merchant Acquiring / payment merchant services.
• Understanding of current financial crime trends and acquiring typologies (e.g. structuring, shell merchants, abuse of merchant facilities).
• Experience providing technical coaching and feedback on FC Business Banking tasks.
• Clear and inspiring communicator, with excellent written and verbal English.
• Empathetic and supportive approach to people leadership.
• Great at prioritising problems and assessing risk in an operations environment.
• Passionate about working in a fast-paced environment and comfortable with change.
• Ability to quickly become a key member of the leadership team and support the pillar.

Requirements

• Experience conducting investigations in an operational setting, with subject matter expertise in FinCrime Business Banking but essentially in Merchant Acquiring.
• Deep knowledge of Know Your Business (KYB) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) principles, and a working understanding of the UK Suspicious Activity Reporting (SAR) regime (including consent requirements and POCA).
• Recent experience with emerging financial crime trends and typologies.
• Experience managing employee relations cases.
• Experience taking individuals and teams from a position of underperformance to high performance.
• Experience accurately interpreting and representing complex management information.
• Holds, or is happy to work towards, the ICA International Advanced Certificate in Anti Money Laundering, or a similar industry qualification (e.g. ACAMS).
• Fluency in MacOS, Slack, and GSuite tools.

Benefits

• £32,200 - £43,600 + Incentive Awards tied to your performance.
• Guaranteed time off on your birthday if it falls on a day you're scheduled to work and it's outside of your training period.
• £1,000 learning budget each year to use on books, training courses and conferences.
• Setup to work from home; all employees are given Macbooks and for fully remote workers we provide extra support for your work-from-home setup.