Head of Financial Crime Operations

Responsibilities

• Strategy, Planning and Execution
• Own the Financial Crime Operations strategy end-to-end: develop the annual plan, set clear priorities, manage delivery against it, and make adjustments as the regulatory environment or business needs shift.
• Translate the financial crime control framework into an operational model that is well-understood, consistently applied, and capable of evolving without losing integrity.
• Act as the primary voice of Financial Crime Operations working closely with the Second Line Financial Crime Risk Department, Deputy and MLRO, presenting the function's performance, and strategic direction in a way that supports informed decision-making.
• Provide senior management with clear, concise analysis of financial crime risk, moving beyond activity reporting to give genuine insight into what the data means and what action it warrants.
• Work closely with the MLRO and other senior stakeholders to ensure the financial crime strategy remains aligned to the firm's overall risk appetite and growth objectives.
• Operational Resilience and Excellence
• Maintain a financial crime operations function that is operationally sound: clear ownership, reliable processes, and the capacity to absorb regulatory change, volume spikes, or incidents without material degradation in quality.
• Set and hold the standard for investigative quality, SAR output, transaction monitoring, and sanctions screening across the function.
• -Build and maintain resilience plans for the function, ensuring critical controls remain effective under stress and that the business can demonstrate operational continuity to regulators when required.
• Hold accountability for all escalated matters that require senior judgement or external engagement, including regulatory interactions and enforcement-adjacent situations.
• Ensure the function's governance and MI framework gives senior management and the Board genuine visibility of the control environment, with emerging risks surfaced early and clearly.
• Process Optimisation and Transformation
• Lead the function's improvement agenda: identify where processes can be fundamentally redesigned rather than incre

Additional Information

About Lendable Lendable is on a mission to build the world's best technology to help people get credit and save money. We're building one of the world's leading fintech companies and are off to a strong start: One of the UK's newest unicorns with a team of just over 700 people Among the fastest-growing tech companies in the UK Profitable since 2017 Backed by top investors including Balderton Capital and Goldman Sachs Loved by customers with the best reviews in the market (4.9 across 10,000s of reviews on Trustpilot ) So far, we've rebuilt the Big Three consumer finance products from scratch: loans, credit cards and car finance . We get money into our customers' hands in minutes instead of days. We're growing fast, and there's a lot more to do: we're going after the two biggest Western markets (UK and US) where trillions worth of financial products are held by big banks with dated systems and painful processes. Join us if you want to Take ownership across a broad remit. You are trusted to make decisions that drive a material impact on the direction and success of Lendable from day 1 Work in small teams of exceptional people, who are relentlessly resourceful to solve problems and find smarter solutions than the status quo Build the best technology in-house , using new data sources, machine learning and AI to make machines do the heavy lifting Role Purpose As the Head of Financial Crime Operations, you will own the financial crime function end-to-end: its strategy, its delivery, and the operational model that underpins it. Reporting to the Director of Complaints, Fraud and Financial Crime, and with the Financial Crime Manager reporting directly to you, you will manage a team of 15 people with varying levels of experience, setting the direction of the function while ensuring day-to-day operations run with the resilience and consistency the business requires. A central part of this role is making the financial crime framework legible to people who are not immersed in it day to day. You will take complex regulatory obligations, risk appetite decisions, and operational data and translate them into reporting and insight that is genuinely useful to senior leadership, Product Managing Directors, and the Board. That means understanding what the data is saying, knowing what matters, and communicating it with precision - and using that data actively to drive the function forward, not just to report on it. You will drive the continuous improvement agenda across the function: refining processes, strengthening operational resilience, and ensuring how the team works scales with business growth and the evolving regulatory environment. This is a role for someone who can hold the strategic view and the operational detail at the same time, and who knows when to act on each.

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