Description
As the Senior Manager, Financial Crime Investigations & Intelligence, you'll lead proactive, complex, and high-risk anti-money laundering and financial crime investigations across Airwallex's global financial infrastructure.
Responsibilities:
- Lead end-to-end investigations into complex financial crime typologies involving cross-border payment flows, multi-currency corporate accounts, complex ownership structures, cross-product financial-crime risks, KYB/UBO considerations and high-risk corridors.
- Oversee case intake, triage, prioritisation and assignment for special investigations, ensuring matters requiring enhanced investigative expertise are resolved thoroughly and within established SLAs.
- Lead financial-crime-related internal fraud and insider-threat investigations where employees or insiders may be involved in fraud, collusion with external parties, misuse of access or other conduct with a financial-crime nexus.
- Analyse layered international transactions across payment rails including SWIFT, local clearing rails, card schemes and alternative payment methods to trace illicit fund movements, identify beneficial owners and uncover hidden counterparty networks.
- Provide investigative analysis, suspect and typology recommendations, quality assurance and escalation support for SAR/STR cases, enabling MLROs to make final filing decisions in accordance with local requirements.
- Translate investigative findings into actionable feedback for Risk, Data and Engineering teams to calibrate transaction monitoring rules, improve automated detection models and address control vulnerabilities.
- Develop and maintain financial-crime typologies, investigative intelligence and threat assessment based on internal investigations, external intelligence, and regulatory guidance; translate these insights into control improvements, targeted training and intelligence briefings.
- Partner with Transaction Monitoring, Onboarding and EDD, Sanctions, Fraud, Legal and regional MLROs to address systemic threats and implement coordinated risk-mitigation measures.
- Build and maintain investigative playbooks, investigative analysis, typology context and case documentation standards and quality-assurance frameworks tailored to B2B fintech, complex law-enforcement referrals, regulatory information request, partner-bank inquiries and partner due-diligence reviews.
- Support internal audits, independent reviews and regulatory inquiries with clear documentation, case files and briefings on investigative methodologies and outcomes.
- Provide day-to-day guidance, peer reviews and typology training to investigators and analysts across the broader Financial Crime Compliance team.
Minimum qualifications:
- 8+ years of dedicated experience in AML/CFT investigations, financial intelligence or special investigations within cross-border payments, global fintech, merchant acquiring or international corporate and commercial banking.
- Deep understanding of cross-border payment mechanisms, including SWIFT, local ACH and clearing schemes, and FX; business payment flows; merchant acquiring; and corporate entity structures, including complex shareholding, shell companies and beneficial ownership.
- A proven track record of independently conducting and documenting complex, multi-layered financial crime investigations from initiation through documented findings, risk recommendations and support to the MLRO-led regulatory reporting process.
- Solid working knowledge of global AML/CTF and sanctions regulatory frameworks, including, where applicable, FATF recommendations, FinCEN/BSA, FCA, AUSTRAC, MAS and other relevant local regulatory requirements.
- A strong analytical mindset, with experience querying, synthesising and interpreting large datasets of transactional and customer data.
- Exceptional written communication skills, demonstrated through investigative narratives and SAR/STR drafting, with the ability to articulate complex financial crime risks to non-compliance stakeholders, including Product and Engineering.
- Comfort working in a high-growth and rapidly evolving fintech environment, managing competing priorities under tight deadlines.