Team Leader KYC

Job description

**About Wahed:** The global financial system wasn't built for everyone. For millions of people, its reliance on interest (riba) creates a barrier to managing money and building wealth without compromising their values. At Wahed, we're changing that. We are a global fintech company on a mission to build a new financial system—one that is ethical, accessible, and entirely interest-free. From our offices across the globe, our team is building products that were once deemed impossible, from pioneering Shariah-compliant equity ETFs, creating riba-free alternatives to high yield savings accounts, to creating no-leverage real estate investments for truly interest-free income producing assets. If you're driven to solve complex problems and believe finance should empower, not exclude, join us in building a more equitable financial future. Job Brief: Lead day-to-day delivery for an assigned KYC team, ensuring efficient workload management, strong quality and control adherence, timely case completion, effective people leadership, and successful implementation of approved operational changes. The role owns team-level outcomes and escalates material cross-team capacity, risk, readiness, or prioritization decisions. ### Job Description: • Operations & capacity: Plan and allocate work by volume, risk, complexity, aging, SLA, analyst capability and jurisdiction accreditation; monitor queues, rebalance capacity, and prevent bottlenecks or breaches. • Quality & controls: Own team quality performance; analyze QC trends and root causes; drive calibration, coaching, corrective actions and closure of audit, compliance and control findings. • Backlog & performance: Maintain queue health and execute backlog-reduction plans without weakening KYC/AML controls. Track quality, productivity, AHT (where relevant), TAT, SLA, aging, escalations and capacity. • People leadership: Set objectives, conduct 1:1s and performance reviews, coach Analysts and Senior Analysts, address underperformance, recognize strong results, and develop SMEs and future leaders. • Complex cases & risk: Oversee high-risk, exception and priority cases; validate escalation quality and provide decisions within delegated authority. Escalate material compliance, policy, financial-crime or systemic concerns. • SOPs, training & knowledge: Maintain approved SOPs and process documentation, embed operational controls, monitor adherence, coordinate onboarding and refresher training, and sustain jurisdiction coverage through cross-training. • Stakeholder coordination: Act as the operational contact for assigned matters and work with Compliance, Risk, Product, Technology, Customer Support and Operations to resolve blockers and track commitments. ### Job Specification: • Bachelor's degree in Finance, Commerce, Business, Economics, Law, Compliance or a related field; relevant KYC/AML, financial-crime, compliance or risk certification is advantageous. • 4-6+ years of relevant experience in KYC, AML, CDD/EDD, financial-crime operations, banking, fintech or financial services. • People-management or team-leadership experience (3+ years preferred), including ownership of quality, productivity, backlog and SLA/TAT performance. • Hands-on experience with complex KYC/AML escalations and exposure to UAT, process improvement, automation, multi-jurisdiction operations or new-country/product launches. •Strong working knowledge of KYC/AML, CDD/EDD, customer risk assessment, sanctions, PEP and adverse- media screening, identity verification, fraud and financial-crime risk, risk-based decision-making, quality control, operational risk, SOPs and performance management. •Familiarity with KYC platforms, screening, case-management and business intelligence tools, reporting systems and automation technologies is preferred.