Financial Crime Onboarding & Exits Investigator - Bank of Santander - Unity Place, Milton Keynes
(2025-08)
- Provided expert input into the triage and risk assessment of Onboarding and Exit (OBE) cases across Retail, Business/Corporate and Private banking customers.
- Supported end-to-end thematic reviews of OBE cases, including manual, event-driven and periodic review cases.
- Conducted detailed customer risk assessments, contributing to risk acceptance, remediation and exit decision-making in line with regulatory and internal requirements.
- Contributed to OBE governance forums, providing recommendations on complex and high-risk cases.
- Gave feedback to support the continuous improvement and development of CDD and OBE processes and teams.
- Consistently exceeded performance expectations, demonstrating strong risk judgement, attention to detail and quality of delivery, resulting in the extension of my contract.
Financial Crime Name Screening Team Lead L2/SME - Bank of Santander - Unity Place, Milton Keynes
(2024-06 - 2025-08)
- Challenged the existing name screening's thinking that true matches (established from Dow Jones compliance application) must be referred to sanctions/CDD into developing a view of mitigating risk from a true match where there is no risk or material change, using no risk rationales to increase quality and efficiencies.
- Collaborated with Line 1 sanctions to develop a process to reduce sanctions referrals on RCA ST's. A streamlined process was introduced using information from myself to produce guidance documents for certain corporate/investments business customers heavy hitters.
- Coaching skills led to team's quality score increasing to the required 95% and remaining there.
- Placed an analyst on an underachieving performance plan as per HR policy. Due to careful documenting of interactions, the analyst was released from contract.
Financial Crime Name Screening Team Lead L1/CDD Remediation Team Lead - Bank of Santander - Unity Place, Milton Keynes
(2023-06 - 2024-06)
- Developed three members of team of 15 analysts to take promotions in other departments.
- Held daily case work coaching sessions to help team to learn the new skills required for CDD on transaction screening cases, resulting in team having the highest pass rate across the department.
- Provided continuous and consistent guidance and support to team and department when advised of risk of redundancy.
- Managed a difficult conversation with an analyst who disagreed with their underachieve end of year rating and this rating was upheld on independent review.
- Chosen by Operations Manager to complete a quality assurance analysis by liaising with the QA team and internal auditors directly, to address any quality assurance misunderstanding and analysts' errors and identifying possible process gaps and rectifying these with appropriate actions.
Financial Crime Name Screening Deputy Team Lead - Bank of Santander - Unity Place, Milton Keynes
(2018-09 - 2023-06)
- Received exceptional rating on performance review for 2021-2022.
- Designed and wrote the Alert Decisioning Rules for L2 Name Screening department.
- Responsible for all training design and delivery for the L2 name screening department, identified from analysis of common errors across the department.
- Managed the team's QC remediation completion and reviewed and feedback to team on all QC/HK markdowns and highlighted any consistent error issues to Team Lead with a plan on how to fix.
- Completed deep dives and made decisions on the most complex alerts which involved working with the sanctions and risk and suggesting policy and procedure updates as appropriate.
Financial Crime Investigator - The Money Shop Head Office - Unit 1 Castle Marina Road, Nottingham
(2013-09 - 2018-09)
- Head hunted to be offered newly created post to reduce cheque fraud – slashed cheque fraud by £290,496 (67%) in 1st year.
- Evaluated escalated SARS, across all products, and investigated and reported suspicious activity to NCA and sort DAML where relevant.
- Identified and referred to management any amendments to policy and training those investigations revealed.
- Accountable for all fraud reporting to appropriate authorities and updating stakeholders on fraud issues monthly.
- Culpable for monitoring effectiveness of existing KYC/KYD policies and recommending amendments to these policies to reduce AML/fraud risk.
- Developed and maintained contacts with external agencies to deliver fraud and ID training to staff and used the training to reducing risk from counterfeit debit cards and identification.
- Assessed impact of new technologies on TMS products such as image clearing of cheque by banks.
- Acted as SME between Compliance, Legal and AML departments.
