Senior Manager, Financial Intelligence Unit FIU

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

*Think you know us?*

Visa is a world leader in payments and technology, with over 259 billion payments transactions flowing safely between consumers, merchants, financial institutions, and government entities in more than 200 countries and territories each year. Our mission is to connect the world through the most innovative, convenient, reliable, and secure payments network, enabling individuals, businesses, and economies to thrive while driven by a common purpose – to uplift everyone, everywhere by being the best way to pay and be paid.

Visa Direct’s Money Movement Solutions provides a multi‑rail money movement capability across Visa Direct for Card, Account and Wallet, allowing clients (banks, fintechs, processors/payment service providers and enterprises/governments) to send and receive funds at scale across multiple endpoints and geographies. The platform is designed to simplify integration and operations while enabling a broad portfolio of money movement use cases and value‑added capabilities, including customer portals and supporting services that help clients manage payments, visibility and operational workflows. Visa Direct’s reach and scale spans 195\+ countries/territories, 150\+ currencies, and circa 11–12B endpoints (cards/accounts/wallets)

Do you feel that you have what it takes to make an impact with a purpose\-driven industry leader? Join us today and experience Life at Visa.

*What’s it all about?*

The Senior Manager – Financial Intelligence Unit, who is also the Nominated Officer for Visa Payments Limited (VPL) is the individual nominated to receive disclosures under Part 3 (terrorist property) of the Terrorism Act 2000(h) or Part 7 (money laundering) of 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 the Suspicious Activity Reporting (SAR) regime and the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) team at Visa Payments Limited (VPL).

To succeed in this role, you must be a senior financial crime intelligence professional who is a proactive go\-getter and passionate about forestalling financial crime. The role incumbent must possess an appropriate level of seniority with compliance eloquence and sharp operational and presentational aptitudes to be able to make independent decisions, support the MLRO, lead a team of FIU subject matter experts, and take and make appropriate decision(s) on unusual or suspicious events.

Functionally, this role sits within the wider VPL second line of defence Compliance function and is responsible for leading the FIU team and supporting the MLRO in delivery, maintenance of financial crime control frameworks, specifically pertaining to suspicious activity investigations, reporting, intelligence sharing and processing compliance questionnaires from VPL clients and partners. 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 (core)

• Act as VPL’s Nominated Officer for the purposes of UK anti‑money laundering (AML) and counter‑terrorist financing 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 such as the NCA, FinCEN, FINTRAC and the FIUTT and manage any request for a Defence Against Money Laundering (DAML) where applicable.


• Maintain strict adherence to anti\-tipping off requirements, ensuring confidentiality and need‑to‑know controls across all FIU activity.


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

FIU operational leadership \& case management

• Lead the FIU team and set clear operating rhythms: case allocation, escalation rules, decision service level agreements (SLAs), quality checks, and workload balancing.


• 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


• Emerging risks linked to new products/use cases (e.g., digital asset / stablecoin‑adjacent flows where relevant to VPL’s regulated perimeter)


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

Governance, oversight \& management information (MI)

• Own the FIU governance framework and ensure the MLRO has sufficient visibility and assurance to discharge their SAR responsibilities.


• Support the MLRO and their team in produce concise, decision‑useful FIU, and more broad VPL Financial Crime framework management information (MI) and Key Risk Indicators (KRIs) for:


• MLRO reporting


• VPL Leadership Team escalations (where required)


• VPL Risk Committee / Board reporting inputs (as requested by MLRO)


• Maintain and continuously improve:


• FIU 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


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

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.


• Ensure consistent approach to requests that involve VPL clients and their underlying customers, reflecting VPL’s operating model


• Manage engagement with internal and external stakeholders on sensitive matters while maintaining confidentiality, privilege where applicable, and correct escalation to Legal / Regulatory as needed.

Control effectiveness, quality, and continuous improvement

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


• Identify and implement process improvements to reduce cycle times and improve decision quality (e.g., better data capture fields, structured narratives, automation of case enrichment, consistent typology tagging). Partner with Compliance Technology to improve tooling (e.g., workflow, case management, structured data fields, MI automation) and support transformation programmes (e.g., workflow migration or enhancements).


• Ensure FIU controls align with VPL’s broader financial crime framework, including transaction monitoring, sanctions screening, diligence, and operational controls.


• Advisory support to MLRO and broader compliance ecosystem


• Act as the MLRO’s primary FIU adviser and escalation point for complex, high‑risk, or novel typologies.


• Support policy/procedure updates and training content related to internal reporting, suspicious activity identification, and escalation pathways.


• Contribute to risk appetite discussions and product governance for new/changed use cases where FIU exposure or intelligence‑sharing considerations arise.

*This is a hybrid position based in London Paddington office. This requires 3 days per week (Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays) attendance in the London office.*

Qualifications

*What we are seeking*

Education

• A relevant graduate degree in relevant disciplines such as Law, Finance, or Economic

Experience

• Significant senior experience in financial crime investigations / FIU operations within payments, banking, fintech, or correspondent‑style money movement.


• 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 investigators/analysts in a high‑throughput environment with strong quality, governance and application/use of Generative AI and tools.


• Proven expertise in producing and presenting meaningful and aesthetic financial crime data, MI and KRIs and presentation decks to senior management.


• Strong capability in analysing complex payment chains and business\-to\-business (B2B) transaction flows (including nested relationships and partner networks).


• Proven ability to write high‑quality, structured SAR narratives and to build defen

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