Financial Crime Team Manager, Merchant Acquiring, Business Banking

🚀 We’re on a mission to make money work for everyone.

We’re waving goodbye to the complicated and confusing ways of traditional banking.

After starting as a prepaid card, our product offering has grown a lot in the last 10 years in the UK. As well as personal and business bank accounts, we offer joint accounts, accounts for 16-17 year olds, a free kids account and credit cards in the UK, with more exciting things to come beyond. Our UK customers can also save, invest and combine their pensions with us.

With our hot coral cards and get-paid-early feature, combined with financial education on social media and our award winning customer service, we have a long history of creating magical moments for our customers!

We’re not about selling products - we want to solve problems and change lives through Monzo ❤️

Remote in the UK 🇬🇧 | 💰£32,200 - £40,750 + Incentive Awards tied to your performance + Benefits ✨

⭐ Our Merchant Acquiring Financial Crime Team

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.

We're looking for an individual with a blend of experience in preventing financial crime in Business Banking — essentially in Merchant Acquiring — and tenured experience of team leadership to join our Financial Crime Operations team.

🔑 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.

🤩 We'd love to hear from you if…

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

Preferred Experience and Qualifications

• You have 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.

🙌 What's in it for you

• £32,200 - £40,750 + Incentive Awards tied to your performance.
• £1,000 learning budget each year to use on books, training courses and conferences.
• We will set you up to work from home; all employees are given Macbooks and for fully remote workers we will provide extra support for your work-from-home setup.
• Plus lots more! Read our full list of benefits.

🌈 The application journey has 3 key steps

• Application questions
• Recruiter call
• Leadership/Technical Interview

We have some guidelines on using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to ace an application and interview at Monzo. You can read them here.

We’ll close this role once we have enough applications for the next stage, so please submit your application as soon as possible to make sure you don’t miss out.

#LI-REMOTE#LI-NEM

Equal opportunities for everyone

Diversity and inclusion are a priority for us and we’re making sure we have lots of support for all of our people to grow at Monzo. At Monzo, we’re embracing diversity by fostering an inclusive environment for all people to do the best work of their lives with us. This is integral to our mission of making money work for everyone. You can read more in our blog, 2026 Diversity and Inclusion Report and 2025 Gender Pay Gap Report.

We’re an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to age, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, family or parental status, national origin, or veteran, neurodiversity or disability status.

If you have a preferred name, please use it to apply. We don't need full or birth names at application stage 😊