Head of Transaction Monitoring & Screening

Head of Transaction Monitoring & Screening

About Equals

Equals is the next-generation global money movement platform built for exceptional businesses operating across borders. We bring international payments, embedded finance, and more together into a single connection that simplifies operations and strengthens financial control. With deep expertise and integrated infrastructure, Equals turns financial complexity into reliable solutions.

With our headquarters in London and teams around the UK and Europe, you will join a very close-knit, talented and supportive team from various backgrounds who believe that bringing different perspectives together helps us understand our customers' needs. United, by one thing, making money management straightforward and cost-effective for our customers.

About the role

We're looking for a Head of Transaction Monitoring & Screening to lead the team that keeps our customers and our platform safe: transaction monitoring, sanctions and payment screening, client information requests and the preparation of suspicious activity reports, run as one joined-up operation.

This is a first-line leadership role where the control and the customer experience are treated as one job. Every alert we review, every screening check and every information request is both a risk decision and a moment a customer feels — and we care about getting both right. You'll build a team that clears its work inside service levels, keeps quality high, drives down false positives, and uses automation and AI thoughtfully so we can grow without letting standards slip. If you believe financial crime should be handled as a living, well-run control rather than a backlog, this is your role.

Responsibilities

• Lead the monitoring and screening operation — transaction monitoring, sanctions and payment screening, information requests and SAR preparation — with clear standards for how work is investigated, disposed and escalated.
• Keep the queues current: make case and alert ageing visible, and treat a growing backlog as an early warning to act on, not a number to explain away.
• Run screening as a real-time control on payments and customers, with clear first-line procedures and timely senior sign-off on escalations.
• Build an information-request (RFI) function that is precise, proportionate and gets it right first time, working closely with our customer-facing teams so requests are clear and never feel like an accusation to a legitimate business.
• Own the quality of the evidence and narratives prepared for the MLRO, so suspicious activity reports are complete and stand up first time. (The MLRO makes and files the decision.)
• Continuously tune and improve detection rules and thresholds alongside our data and analytics colleagues, reducing false positives while keeping the control effective — and documenting the rationale.
• Introduce automation and AI to handle routine work under strong quality assurance, keeping experienced people on the cases that need judgement.
• Provide clear, trustworthy management information on service levels, quality, effectiveness and cost to governance.
• Build and lead a high-performing team: hire well, coach continuously, and set a consistently high bar.

Your Profile

Skills & Experience

• A proven track record leading transaction monitoring, sanctions/payment screening or financial-crime operations at scale in payments, fintech or financial services, with the numbers to demonstrate it.
• The drive to keep the operation current and high-quality — owning problems end to end, finding the root cause, and not stopping at the first obstacle.
• Strong operational discipline: work completed within service levels, thresholds tuned and documented, controls that hold, and a clean audit trail.
• A customer mindset applied to controls — information requests and account restrictions handled clearly, proportionately and with care.
• Practical experience introducing automation or AI into operations, with a clear view of where machines help and where human judgement is essential.
• A solid understanding of the boundary between first-line operations and the MLRO/second-line decision to report.
• A track record of hiring, developing and leading high-performing teams and managing performance fairly and decisively.

Desirable Skills

• Educated to degree level or above, ideally in law, finance, economics or a related discipline.
• A relevant professional certification in financial crime or compliance, such as ICA or ACAMS.
• Experience of SAR/DAML preparation and working with an MLRO and the relevant authorities.
• Hands-on experience with transaction-monitoring and screening systems and, ideally, AI or automation tools used in financial-crime operations.
• Experience designing risk-based or straight-through processing and running a threshold-tuning programme.
• Experience running a dedicated information-request (RFI) function with clear standards.
• Familiarity with UK/FCA financial-crime expectations and sanctions regimes.
• Experience managing or scaling operations across multiple locations.
• Experience in a high-growth, changing or post-merger environment.

Diversity & inclusion

Equals is committed to building a workplace where everyone can be themselves. We actively welcome different perspectives, backgrounds and experiences, and we'll work with you to understand what you need to do your best work. We're an equal opportunities employer and proud of it.

We offer hybrid working across our teams, balancing time in the office — for collaboration, events and the relationships that make work rewarding — with the flexibility to work remotely where roles allow.

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