Head of Anti-Money Laundering

Location: United Kingdom
Department: Customer (Member) Operations
Posted:

About Tide

At Tide, we are building a finance & admin platform designed to save small businesses time and money. We provide our members with business accounts and related banking services, but also a comprehensive set of connected administrative solutions from invoicing to accounting.

Launched in 2017, Tide is now the leading business financial platform in the UK with 575,000 SME members (10% market share) and more than 250,000 SMEs in India. Headquartered in London, Tide has over 1,800 Tideans across the UK, Bulgaria, India, Serbia, Romania, Ukraine and Germany. 

Tide is rapidly growing, expanding into new markets and always looking for passionate and driven people. Join us in our mission to empower small businesses and help them save time and money.  

 

About the team: 

Exciting opportunity for an experienced leader to work in our Ongoing Monitoring team. As a senior member of the team, we're looking for someone who is passionate about customer experience and fighting financial crime and wants to help drive our business forward as we continue to grow and expand in new markets. 

It's an opportunity to work with an amazing team across multiple geographies, including analysts, team leaders, product and engineering managers, data scientists and operations managers. The role has exposure to many senior stakeholders across the business and is at the heart of what we do to protect our customers. 

You will be leading a key vertical in our first line of defence (1LOD) operations’ department, responsible for monitoring the activity of our SME customers (‘members’) for the purpose of preventing, detecting and reporting sanctions, money laundering, terrorism financing, tax evasion, bribery and corruption, money mules (excluding fraud). 

Responsible for setting and delivering a strategy for financial crime operations and managing a team of 50+ to review transaction alerts, working closely with our fraud team, product, operations and second line oversight teams.

 

About the role: 

As a Head of AML you will be:

  • Leading, developing and mentoring a growing team of 50+ analysts, team leads and managers spread between India, Bulgaria and the UK.
  • Serving as a subject matter expert within 1LOD on all matters relating to money laundering, counter-terrorism, tax evasion, sanction evasion and bribery and corruption. You'll work closely with our Head of Fraud, and fraud colleagues, to ensure synergy between the two.
  • Working with our product & data teams and third-party suppliers to continuously improve our AI Models and policy rules to identify and prevent financial crime.
  • Encouraging a continuous learning culture within Tide where non-fraud financial crime typologies are rapidly fed back to update and improve our controls. 
  • Balancing the need to keep financial crime levels within Tide’s risk appetite, as determined by the board, with delivering the highest level of service to our members, especially in the management of blocked accounts, blocked transactions and other controls.
  • Constantly looking to make manual processes more efficient and increase automation where possible. Working closely with your product team to improve back office and case management tools and processes.
  • Working closely with our 2LOD oversight risk and compliance teams to ensure your team is adhering to Tide policies, procedures and risk appetite, quickly able to identify financial crime trends and themes, and amend controls as required.
  • Reporting to senior management on non-fraud financial crime KPIs and SLAs.
  • Ensuring your team is adequately trained and resourced, working closely with our Talent and People partners and internal expert trainers to ensure we continue to recruit, upskill and retain the very best employees.

 

What we are looking for :

  • Extensive experience managing large 1LoD operational teams.
  • Previous experience in the financial industry including time spent in a fast-moving scale-up business (ideally a Fintech).
  • Passionate about fighting financial crime and have an excellent  understanding of financial crime risks (particularly non-fraud) for a mass market business, ideally in the SME segment; you have experience in the specific types of non-fraud financial crime (especially sanctions, money laundering, terrorism financing, tax evasion, modern slavery, money mules). 
  • Excited about providing a great member experience.
  • Experience working within a regulated environment and have a good understanding of the UK regulations (including POCA, TACT &  PSR). You have experience of FCA reporting requirements.
  • Product and technology driven and ideally have had practical experience in working with product, data and engineering teams to develop state of the art AI models, policy rules and automation.
  • Experience in engaging with external product vendors and payment partners as well as regulatory, law enforcement and industry contacts.   
  • Take ownership and have proven leadership & management experience, having scaled teams effectively.
  • Data driven and comfortable with OKRs, KPIs, KRIs, SLAs, forecasting, budgeting and planning.
  • Flexible and creative mind and aim to bring out the best in people around you.
  • You naturally align with Tide’s values (MemberFirst, OneTeam, DataDriven).

 

What you’ll get in return: 

  • A competitive salary
  • Share options
  • Flexible working options
  • 25 days holiday with the option to take 5 extra days of unpaid leave per year
  • 3 days paid volunteering or L&D time off per year
  • Personal L&D budget of £1,000 professional L&D budget per year 
  • Group Life Insurance, Vitality Health and Dental Insurance
  • Spacious brand-new office by Old Street station, in London, with an all-day snacks bar
  • Enhanced family-friendly leave
  • Access to a global mental wellbeing platform that provides 1:1 video therapy sessions with accredited therapists and unlimited chat therapy sessions
  • Work from home budget
  • Team socials – virtual and physical events
  • Sabbatical leave

 

Tidean Ways of Working 

At Tide, we champion a flexible workplace model that supports both in-person and remote work to cater to the specific needs of our different teams. 

While remote work is supported, we believe in the power of face-to-face interactions to foster team spirit and collaboration. Our offices are designed as hubs for innovation and team-building, where we encourage regular in-person gatherings to foster a strong sense of community.

 

Tide is a place for everyone

At Tide, we believe that we can only succeed if we let our differences enrich our culture. Our Tideans come from a variety of backgrounds and experience levels. We consider everyone irrespective of their ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, family or parental status, national origin, veteran, neurodiversity status or disability status. We celebrate diversity in our workforce as a cornerstone of our success. Our commitment to a broad spectrum of ideas and backgrounds is what enables us to build products that resonate with our members’ diverse needs and lives. 

We are One Team and foster a transparent and inclusive environment, where everyone’s voice is heard.