Alexander Barnes is leading the search for a Financial Crime Lead to own complex FIU investigations and transaction monitoring for a high-growth, regulated fintech operating at scale across payments and consumer financial products.

This is a senior, hands-on FIU role with direct responsibility for complex investigations, transaction monitoring effectiveness, and regulatory escalation in a fast-moving environment.

This role owns complex financial crime investigations and the performance of the transaction monitoring framework.

Key responsibilities:

FIU investigations and leadership

• Lead senior investigators handling complex, multi-layered Level 3 cases.
• Conduct deep-dive investigations across transaction networks, account relationships, and product flows.
• Identify and assess sophisticated money laundering and financial crime typologies involving layering, structuring, and cross-border activity.
• Own the full investigation lifecycle from escalation through to SAR submission.

Transaction monitoring optimisation

• Drive ongoing tuning and optimisation of transaction monitoring scenarios and thresholds.
• Improve alert quality through segmentation, back-testing, and reduction of false positives.
• Partner with data and engineering teams on model performance, detection gaps, and monitoring effectiveness.
• Ensure monitoring remains aligned to regulatory expectations and evolving risk exposure.

Data-led investigation and intelligence

• Perform forensic transaction analysis using SQL and large datasets.
• Incorporate OSINT and external intelligence into investigations where required.
• Produce management information and trend analysis on emerging risks and typologies.

Regulatory execution and governance

• Manage SAR escalations and submissions, ensuring clear rationale, evidential support, and regulatory timelines are met.
• Support regulatory reviews, audits, and internal assurance activity.
• Act as a point of contact for complex FIU matters where escalation is required.

Systems and tooling

• Support enhancements to transaction monitoring platforms and data infrastructure.
• Work with internal teams on system changes, migrations, or capability upgrades.
• Integrate specialist tooling where needed to support complex investigations.

Team development

• Coach and develop investigators on advanced investigative techniques.
• Maintain consistent investigation standards and decision-making quality across the team.
• Stay ahead of emerging financial crime risks relevant to fintech and payments businesses.

Ideal background

• 7+ years’ experience in financial crime, with significant time spent in FIU or complex investigations roles.
• Proven leadership of complex investigations within fintech, payments, or digital financial services.
• Strong understanding of UK and EU AML frameworks and regulatory expectations.
• Hands-on experience optimising transaction monitoring systems and alert quality.
• Comfortable working directly with data, investigators, and cross-functional teams.
• Track record of high-quality SAR submissions and sound regulatory outcomes.
• Experience operating in fast-growth, product-driven environments.

Nice to have

• CAMS or equivalent certification.
• Experience with blockchain or digital asset investigations.
• Exposure to advanced analytics or model-driven monitoring approaches.

Alexander Barnes is leading the search for a Head of Fraud Product for a global fintech operating across cards, bank payments, and digital accounts.

This hire will own the end-to-end fraud programme globally, building and scaling fraud prevention through product, engineering, data, and operations, embedded directly into each customer and payment flow.

Purpose of the role

This role owns fraud outcomes across the lifecycle. Detection, decisioning, intervention, and learning. From signal design to real-time controls to operational feedback loops.

To define and deliver a global fraud product strategy covering:

• Card fraud
• Bank and payment fraud
• Account Takeover

Key responsibilities

• Global fraud strategy: Define and drive the global fraud roadmap across cards, bank payments, and account access, aligned to business growth and risk appetite.
• Product and engineering delivery: Work directly with product and engineering teams to design, build, and ship fraud controls embedded into each product and flow.
• Detection and prevention: Develop real-time fraud detection and prevention capabilities using rules, signals, and ML models across multiple fraud typologies.
• End-to-end ownership: Own how fraud is identified, actioned, reviewed, and learned from across the full customer and transaction lifecycle.
• Data and model partnership: Partner with data science to shape model inputs, thresholds, precision/recall trade-offs, and ongoing performance monitoring.
• Operational integration: Build tight feedback loops with fraud operations so intelligence, outcomes, and emerging threats directly inform product improvements.
• Global scale and consistency: Ensure fraud controls scale across regions while remaining effective against local fraud patterns and behaviours.

Ideal candidates will bring

• Senior experience building fraud prevention in fintech, payments, or financial services.
• Direct exposure to card fraud, bank payment fraud, and account takeover.
• Proven experience delivering fraud controls through product and engineering, not policy alone.
• Strong understanding of ML-driven fraud detection and its real-world limitations.
• Comfort owning outcomes across multiple products and markets.
• Experience working closely with fraud operations, investigations, or risk teams.
• A data-led mindset with the ability to turn insights into shipped solutions.