Group Financial Crime Governance & Risk Senior Manager

Wise is a global technology company, building the best way to move and manage the world’s money.
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Whether people and businesses are sending money to another country, spending abroad, or making and receiving international payments, Wise is on a mission to make their lives easier and save them money.

As part of our team, you will be helping us create an entirely new network for the world's money.
For everyone, everywhere.

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As the Group Financial Crime Governance and Risk Senior Manager, you will be responsible for maintaining, uplifting and enforcing Wise’s global financial crime risk program, bridging the gap between high-level enterprise strategy and granular operational execution.

Operating as a critical pillar of our Second Line of Defence (2LoD), you will provide robust oversight and constructive challenge to ensure our risk assessments function as strategic tools that drive smarter due diligence and a safer platform.

You will be responsible for enabling proactive risk management through the continuous evolution of methodologies and KRIs, while overseeing the development of sophisticated MI dashboards and reporting to ensure that financial crime controls operate effectively across all global and regional teams.

Key Responsibilities

1. Framework Development & Methodology

• Global Risk Framework: Develop, maintain, and evolve the Group Financial Crime Risk Framework, ensuring full integration with the Enterprise Risk Management Framework (ERMF).

• Methodology Ownership: Lead the design and implementation of core risk assessment methodologies, including:

  • FCRA (Financial Crime Risk Assessment)

  • Country Risk Assessment

  • Customer Risk Assessment

  • Industry Risk Assessment

2. Financial Crime Risk Assessment (FCRA)

• FCRA alignment: Provide 2LoD oversight on the global inherent risks assessed as part of the entity-wide FCRA. This should include the likelihood and impact assessment at Group level which is cascaded to regions and the controls mapping, ensuring consistency and alignment across all entities. 

• Wise Platform Integration: Partner with the Group Wise Platform (WP) FinCrime Compliance team to ensure the FCRA captures specific inherent risks for various WP models and ensure the control mapping is accurate for each integration model.

3. Risk Management 

• Risk Appetite: Collaborate with the First Line of Defence (1LoD) in the continuous review and setting of financial crime risk appetite.

• Monitoring & Remediation: Monitor adherence to financial crime risk appetite and provide expert 2LoD support in defining remediation plans when breaches occur.

• Strategic Data Usage: Identify opportunities to use the output of all risk assessments to enhance Wise’s Customer Risk Assessment (CRA) and due diligence processes.

• Control Monitoring: Provide robust 2LoD oversight and challenge over the outputs of Wise’s continuous control monitoring and collaborate with 1LoD in identifying how to uplift or define new controls where existing controls are not operating effectively. 

• MI & Reporting: Support the Group Wise Platform FinCrime Compliance team in implementing a dedicated Risk Management Framework, including mapping Management Information (MI) to effectively monitor risks at partner and model level. 

4. Issue and incident management

• Process: Close alignment with 1LoD and the Regulatory Risk team in defining effective issue and incident management processes giving the Group FinCrime Risk team clear oversight of all open issues and incidents and the impact of Wise’s overall risk exposure. 

• Incident oversight: Provide 2LoD oversight of incident management, inputting on the classification, management and remediation as required ensuring any follow up actions are also fed into the issue management process. 

• Issue oversight: Oversee financial crime-related issues, tracking progress, issue quality and resolution time and providing reporting updated to management when needed.

5. Governance, Intelligence & Reporting

• Quarterly Committees: Manage BAU requirements for quarterly committees, providing critical "check and challenge" on 1LoD reporting.

• Trend Analysis & Thematic Reviews: Analyse financial crime issues and incidents to identify common themes and emerging risks and conduct deep-dive thematic reviews into emerging risks and trends and their impact on the organisation. This includes reporting on the review outcome and an analysis on Wise’s current control framework to mitigate those emerging risks.

6. Stakeholder Engagement & Culture

• Regional Support: Act as a central point of contact for regional teams, supporting the localized implementation of risk frameworks and assessments.

• Cross-Functional Leadership: Foster strong relationships across the business to embed a culture of financial crime risk awareness and accountability.

• Experience: 7+ years in financial crime compliance and/or risk, with a specific focus on enterprise-wide risk management.  

• Knowledge: Strong knowledge of global financial crime regulations, data analysis and interpretation, with a particular focus on financial crime risk taxonomies and control frameworks. SQL and LLM knowledge and experience is beneficial. 

• Leadership: Experience in leading strategic financial crime projects enabling compliant growth of a key business area. Adept at collaborating cross-functionally to meet multi-jurisdictional requirements. 

• Skills: Excellent communication, analytical and leadership skills. Ability to influence cross-functional teams and senior stakeholders. Solution-oriented approach to challenging and supporting the first line. Proactively able to identify solutions to problems with limited guidance. 

• Education: Bachelor’s degree in law, finance or other related areas. Additional certifications such as CAMS or ICA are beneficial.

Hybrid working: 3 days on site and 2 from home

Working hours: 9am to 6pm

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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