Head of Financial Crime Service Delivery

Wise is a global technology company, building the best way to move and manage the world’s money.
Min fees. Max ease. Full speed.

Whether people and businesses are sending money to another country, spending abroad, or making and receiving international payments, Wise is on a mission to make their lives easier and save them money.

As part of our team, you will be helping us create an entirely new network for the world's money.
For everyone, everywhere.

More about our mission and what we offer.

Your mission

You'll lead the global service delivery function that keeps our Financial Crime Operations brilliant and running at scale. This is a senior, strategic role: you're designing and owning the operating model end-to-end to let a high-volume, globally distributed operation deliver consistent and compliant outcomes. 

You're here to build something that scales: defining how we perform, how we measure success, and how we adapt a global model to local needs without losing speed or consistency. You'll hold the tension between global standardisation and regional effectiveness, ensuring what works at 300 people still holds at 600.

This is about designing for complexity and delivering simplicity, in true Wise fashion.

What you'll be doing

You will direct a geographically distributed team, serving as the strategic bridge between regional execution and enterprise-wide priorities. This is a high-accountability position with substantial scope, where you will function as the operational cornerstone of the function. Your mandate encompasses SLA governance, KPI optimisation, localisation strategy, capacity planning, and the cultivation of high-performing strategic partnerships.

Global Service Delivery

• Own execution across all sites, queues, and markets: throughput, SLA delivery, and capacity planning are yours
• Coordinate hiring timelines, headcount tracking, and coverage plans across geographies, underpinned by robust forecasting that accounts for variable and unpredictable business condition
• Provide input into location decisions: site capacity, cost, risk concentration, and inter-site dependencies
• Balance capacity across regions, share best practice, and maintain consistent ways of working globally
• Turn QC insights into actionable feedback loops for improvements

Change and Transformation

• Lead significant change programmes inside the ops function: system changes and structural reorganisation
• Approach change management as a discipline, not just a communication exercise

Operating Model and Performance

• Manage both a global centre of excellence layer and regional delivery teams at the same time, resolving the tension between standardisation and local fit structurally
• Set meaningful targets at team, regional, and global level, and build the cadence to track and act on them
• Own escalation protocols, to ensure the function runs with consistency and professionalism everywhere it operates
• Own operational health reporting: surfacing risks, blockers, and magnitude issues in real time to senior leadership

Coordination and Stakeholder Management

• Act as the coordination layer between various layers of the business to align on shared priorities and resolve cross-team challenges
• Support regional leads with stakeholder management and own escalation coordination where needed

People, Culture and Building Leadership Capability

• Build a leadership layer that operates with maturity, consistency, and high standards: leads who own their teams, manage performance confidently, and don't need hand-holding to make good calls
• Establish clear expectations for what great leadership looks like at every level, and hold the line on those standards across all sites
• Use your leads as your primary lens into operational health: building the trust, cadence, and rigour needed to get accurate signal from the ground up
• Identify gaps in leadership capability early and act on them: coaching where there's potential, making harder calls where there isn't
• Own team culture, and site environment across locations
• Own organisational structure and workforce strategy, including redesign initiatives, capability planning, and role architecture; escalate and resolve people issues while ensuring recruitment and role scoping align with functional growth and strategic direction.
• Escalation point for people issues; support recruitment, role scoping, and refreshing requirements as the function evolves
• Lead internal communications, organisational updates, and engagement initiatives; translate strategic decisions, including difficult or unpopular ones, into clear, credible messaging that maintains trust and alignment across teams.
• Create the conditions for leads to grow into genuinely strong people managers — not just operators — so the function stops being dependent on heroics and starts running on structure

Experience:

• Ideally 10+ years in Operations, preferably within banking or fintech
• Directly led or built out an operations function of 400+ people across multiple geographies
• Designed and implemented forward-looking organisational structures from scratch or through significant transformation
• Built operating models for scale, with architectures that hold integrity at 300 people and remain robust at 600
• Proven track record of bringing rigour and discipline to complex, high-volume operations
• Designed and documented operational workflows applying Lean Six Sigma methodologies
• Managed both a global centre of excellence layer and regional delivery simultaneously
• Defined service delivery targets, SLAs, and coverage models that are realistic, measurable, and defensible to senior leadership
• Designed for operational complexity where no two days or workstreams are the same
• Led significant change programmes within large operational functions
• Able to anticipate future operational needs and design structures that evolve ahead of business growth

Leadership:

• 5+ years leading and scaling multi-layered organisations across geographies and time zones
• Knows how to set meaningful targets at team, regional, and global level, cascade them through the organisation 
• Has run performance management cycles in ambitious environments
• You've built future leaders, not just managed people
• Track record of influencing without authority and building trust with stakeholders outside your reporting line

How you work:

• Data-driven decision maker, comfortable with tools like Looker, Superset, or similar
• Exceptional communicator and stakeholder manager; fluent across all communication platforms and formats, able to bridge insights and BAU impact in both directions with clarity and credibility in written and verbal communication
• Proactive and autonomous: you spot gaps and fix them without being asked
• Comfortable with ambiguity and fast-paced ambitious environments
• Can provide operational input that is clear, realistic, and defensible to senior leadership

Why this role matters

FinCrime Operations is at the heart of keeping Wise and our customers safe. But even the best people and processes fall flat without a solid operational backbone: clear structures, consistent standards, and the rigour to deliver at scale across multiple geographies.

You'll shape how hundreds of people across the globe operate, perform, and deliver every single day.

If you’re ready to take on an exciting challenge and make a meaningful impact, we’d love to hear from you! Please submit your resume in English as soon as possible.

For everyone, everywhere. We're people building money without borders  — without judgement or prejudice, too. We believe teams are strongest when they are diverse, equitable and inclusive.

We're proud to have a truly international team, and we celebrate our differences.
Inclusive teams help us live our values and make sure every Wiser feels respected, empowered to contribute towards our mission and able to progress in their careers.

If you want to find out more about what it's like to work at Wise visit Wise.Jobs.

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