Financial Crime Intelligence and Oversight Senior Manager

About Us
Visa is a world leader in payments technology, facilitating transactions between consumers, merchants, financial institutions and government entities across more than 200 countries and territories, dedicated to uplifting everyone, everywhere by being the best way to pay and be paid.

At Visa, you'll have the opportunity to create impact at scale — tackling meaningful challenges, growing your skills and seeing your contributions impact lives around the world.

Join Visa and do work that matters – to you, to your community, and to the world. Progress starts with you.

Job Description

The Senior Manager – Financial Crime Intelligence & Oversight, who is also the Nominated Officer for Visa Payments Limited (VPL) is the individual nominated to receive disclosures under the Terrorism Act 2000 and the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002. This role discharges responsibilities as delegated by VPL’s Money Laundering Reporting Officer (MLRO).

This is pivotal and exciting role reporting into Visa Direct’s Group MLRO and has responsibility for overseeing the Financial Crime Intelligence & Oversight (FCIO) team and the Suspicious Activity Reporting (SAR) regime at Visa Payments Limited (VPL).

To succeed in this role, you must be a senior financial crime second line of defence professional who is a proactive go-getter and seasoned across the entire suite of financial crime controls, not just external suspicions reporting. The role incumbent must possess an appropriate level of seniority with compliance eloquence and sharp operational and presentational aptitudes to be able to support the MLRO in maintaining oversight of VPL’s financial crime framework and analysing financial crime intelligence to report suspicions externally and/or to further enhance the control framework.

Functionally, this role sits within the wider VPL second line of defence Compliance function and is responsible for leading the MLRO’s management information (MI) function, spearheading suspicious activity investigations and reporting, as well as leading thematic / trigger-based reviews across Visa’s cross border money movement business.

This a local role that has a profound global impact. The regulatory remit of this role extends to the National Crime Agency (NCA), Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC) and Financial Intelligence Unit of Trinidad and Tobago (the FIUTT).

What we expect of you, day to day

Nominated Officer statutory duties

• Act as VPL’s Nominated Officer, as delegated by the MLRO, for the purposes of UK anti‑money laundering (AML) and counter‑terrorist financing and sanctions obligations, including duties under the Proceeds of Crime Act (POCA), Terrorism Act, and the Money Laundering Regulations (MLRs).

• Receive, review, and evaluate internal suspicious activity reports raised by employees and operational teams (e.g., transaction monitoring, sanctions screening, diligence, operations, partner Requests for Information (RFIs), fraud notifications).

• Determine, applying independent judgement, whether the internal information gives rise to knowledge, suspicion, or reasonable grounds to suspect money laundering or terrorist financing.

• Where required, submit external SARs to the relevant authority and manage any request for a Defence Against Money Laundering (DAML) where applicable.

• Ensure decisions to file (or not file) are fully documented, quality‑checked, and retained in line with recordkeeping requirements.

• Where relevant, submit true sanction match reports to the relevant regulatory body / government agencies such as OFSI.

FCIO operational leadership

• Lead the VPL FCIO team

• Oversee end‑to‑end case handling across
  • Internal SAR intake, triage, investigation, decisioning, and external filing
  • Fraud notifications and conversion to reportable suspicions (where applicable)
  • Official requests / law enforcement enquiries (UK and international)
  • Bank / network partner RFIs that present suspicious indicators
  • True Sanction matches which require government agency reporting
  • Emerging risks linked to new products/use cases (e.g., digital asset / stablecoin‑adjacent flows where relevant to VPL’s regulated perimeter)

• Ensure the FCIO is operationally resilient: cross‑training, documented playbooks/procedures, succession planning, and avoidance of single points of failure.

• Drive quality checking within the FCIO function: sampling, peer review, error reduction, and continuous improvement.

• Identify and implement process improvements to FCIO team efficiencies and productivity, including agentic and GenAI implementations.

• Lead thematic and trigger-based reviews of clients, partners and recent publications from government / law-enforcement agencies to inform the MLRO and Compliance operations of emerging risks and impacts on VPL’s operations and risk profile.

• Partner with Compliance Technology to improve FCIO tooling and support transformation programmes.

Governance and Management Information (MI)

• Own VPL’s financial crime MI framework including Key Risk Indicators (KRIs), and ensure the MLRO has sufficient visibility and access to financial crime control data and insights at all times.

• Collaborate with Compliance Operations and other 2LoD functions, such as Quality Assurance, in order to produce concise and broad VPL Financial Crime framework MI and for:

• • MLRO reporting and oversight
  • VPL Leadership Team escalations (where required)
  • VPL Risk Committee / Board reporting inputs (as requested by MLRO)
  • Business-Wide Risk Assessments

• Maintain and report on

• • FCIO registers (internal SAR register, external SAR register, DAML log where used)
  • Case outcome taxonomy and typology mapping (consistent categories month‑to‑month)
  • Ageing and SLA dashboards, backlog thresholds, quality outcomes, and root causes
  • Trend analysis for clients, corridors, products, and network partners

• Work closely with other Visa regulated entities MLRO teams to share intelligence and best practices.

Law enforcement liaison & external stakeholder management

• Serve as VPL’s day‑to‑day interface for law enforcement requests, including validation of requests, appropriate response handling, secure transmission, and full audit trail.

• Manage, process and address all incoming external due diligence questionnaires from clients and partners in line with agreed SLAs

• Lead the end-to-end coordination of financial crime audits and independent framework reviews

Advisory support to MLRO function and broader compliance ecosystem

• Act as the MLRO’s primary financial crime intelligence and oversight adviser and escalation point for management information, control framework issues, suspicious activity and emerging typologies

• Lead the design & delivery of financial crime compliance training VISA staff on a myriad of topics.

• Support other members of the VPL MLRO function on business-as-usual work as well as transformation initiatives.

Visa requires at least 3 days per week in office, expectations of these days will be confirmed by your Hiring Manager.

Qualifications

Experience

• Significant senior experience in second line of defence financial crime compliance work within payments, banking, fintech, or correspondent‑style money movement.
• Must have extensive experience and technical knowledge of all financial crime controls including Client Due Diligence, Transaction Monitoring, Sanctions, Quality Assurance and External Reporting.
• Proven expertise in producing and presenting meaningful and aesthetic financial crime data, MI and KRIs and presentation decks to senior management.
• Demonstrable expertise in the multi-FIU suspicious activity reporting regimes, including internal reporting frameworks, external SAR filing, DAML concepts, and tipping‑off controls.
• Experience leading teams of compliance professionals in a high‑throughput environment with strong quality, governance and application/use of Generative AI and tools.
• Strong capability in analysing complex payment chains and business-to-business (B2B) transaction flows, including crypto, stablecoin and virtual currencies typologies
• Proven ability to write high‑quality, structured SAR narratives and to build defensible decision logs.
• Experience partnering with product/technology teams to support business propositions and new products / verticals.
• Exposure to emerging typologies relevant to modern payments (e.g., mule activity, digital assets typologies, sanctions evasion patterns, stablecoin‑adjacent fiat flows).

Qualifications

Professional AML qualification preferred (e.g., ICA, Association of Certified Anti‑Money Laundering Specialists (ACAMS), or equivalent).

Visa is an EEO Employer

Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability or protected veteran status. Visa will also consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with EEOC guidelines and applicable local law.