Senior Manager, Financial Crime Investigations & Intelligence
Airwallex · Kuala Lumpur
About Airwallex
Airwallex is the AI-native financial operating system for a real-time, intelligent economy. More than 675,000 businesses, including McLaren Racing, Qantas, SHEIN, and TikTok, use us, directly or through our platform partners, to run their financial operations or build and monetize financial products of their own.
We started in Melbourne in 2015 to build the infrastructure global commerce runs on. We're the regulated backbone behind global payments: not by accident, but by design. A decade plus, 85+ licenses, and a financial infrastructure spanning North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific.
We're co-headquartered in San Francisco and Singapore, with more than 2,700 people across 27 offices. We hire builders with founder-level energy, people who move fast with good judgment, dig in with real curiosity, and make calls from first principles rather than waiting to be told what to do. Read our operating principles to see it in full.
About the team
Regulatory & Compliance is where we build the trust, discipline, and operational resilience required to scale a generational financial platform.
As Airwallex grows across 30+ markets, this team turns regulatory complexity into strategic control. You'll lead compliance, enterprise risk, and regulatory engagement in a way that protects the business while letting it move with conviction. Our ambition goes beyond meeting expectations: we're building a risk posture that acts as a competitive moat, grounded in ownership, proactive regulatory partnerships, and frameworks that scale globally while respecting local nuance.
It's a team for strategic operators with sharp judgment, high standards, and the confidence to execute at pace in a high-stakes environment. You'll thrive here if you can balance rigor with progress and influence across functions.
If you want to architect the benchmark for trust and resilience in global finance, your work here will have a massive impact.
What you'll do
As the Senior Manager, Financial Crime Investigations & Intelligence, you’ll lead proactive, complex, and high-risk anti-money laundering and financial crime investigations across Airwallex’s global financial infrastructure. You’ll act as an investigative subject-matter expert and operational lead, helping identify and mitigate risks across cross-border payments, corporate accounts, cards, FX and embedded finance. This role is based in Singapore or Malaysia, 5 days per week.
Responsibilities:
Lead end-to-end investigations into complex financial crime typologies involving cross-border payment flows, multi-currency corporate accounts, complex ownership structures, cross-product financial-crime risks, KYB/UBO considerations and high-risk corridors.
Oversee case intake, triage, prioritisation and assignment for special investigations, ensuring matters requiring enhanced investigative expertise are resolved thoroughly and within established SLAs.
Lead financial-crime-related internal fraud and insider-threat investigations where employees or insiders may be involved in fraud, collusion with external parties, misuse of access or other conduct with a financial-crime nexus. Partner with Fraud, Infosec, People/HR, Employment Legal and senior management. Provide evidence-based findings and risk-based recommendations.
Analyse layered international transactions across payment rails including SWIFT, local clearing rails, card schemes and alternative payment methods to trace illicit fund movements, identify beneficial owners and uncover hidden counterparty networks.
Provide investigative analysis, suspect and typology recommendations, quality assurance and escalation support for SAR/STR cases, enabling MLROs to make final filing decisions in accordance with local requirements.
Translate investigative findings into actionable feedback for Risk, Data and Engineering teams to calibrate transaction monitoring rules, improve automated detection models and address control vulnerabilities.
Develop and maintain financial-crime typologies, investigative intelligence and threat assessment based on internal investigations, external intelligence, and regulatory guidance; translate these insights into control improvements, targeted training and intelligence briefings.
Partner with Transaction Monitoring, Onboarding and EDD, Sanctions, Fraud, Legal and regional MLROs to address systemic threats and implement coordinated risk-mitigation measures.
Build and maintain investigative playbooks, investigative analysis, typology context and case documentation standards and quality-assurance frameworks tailored to B2B fintech, complex law-enforcement referrals, regulatory information request, partner-bank inquiries and partner due-diligence reviews..
Support internal audits, independent reviews and regulatory inquiries with clear documentation, case files and briefings on investigative methodologies and outcomes.
Provide day-to-day guidance, peer reviews and typology training to investigators and analysts across the broader Financial Crime Compliance team.
Who you are
We're looking for people who meet the minimum requirements for this role. The preferred qualifications are great to have, but are not mandatory.
Minimum qualifications:
8+ years of dedicated experience in AML/CFT investigations, financial intelligence or special investigations within cross-border payments, global fintech, merchant acquiring or international corporate and commercial banking.
Deep understanding of cross-border payment mechanisms, including SWIFT, local ACH and clearing schemes, and FX; business payment flows; merchant acquiring; and corporate entity structures, including complex shareholding, shell companies and beneficial ownership.
A proven track record of independently conducting and documenting complex, multi-layered financial crime investigations from initiation through documented findings, risk recommendations and support to the MLRO-led regulatory reporting process.
Solid working knowledge of global AML/CTF and sanctions regulatory frameworks, including, where applicable,FATF recommendations, FinCEN/BSA, FCA, AUSTRAC,MAS and other relevant local regulatory requirements.
A strong analytical mindset, with experience querying, synthesising and interpreting large datasets of transactional and customer data.
Exceptional written communication skills, demonstrated through investigative narratives and SAR/STR drafting, with the ability to articulate complex financial crime risks to non-compliance stakeholders, including Product and Engineering.
Comfort working in a high-growth and rapidly evolving fintech environment, managing competing priorities under tight deadlines.
Preferred qualifications:
A professional certification such as CAMS, CFE or an equivalent ICA diploma.
Practical experience with data querying and visualisation tools such as SQL, Python, Tableau or network/link analysis software.
Experience investigating financial crime risks in digital assets or crypto rails, or embedded finance/BaaS integrations.
Applicant Safety Policy: Fraud and Third-Party Recruiters
To protect you from recruitment scams, please be aware that Airwallex will not ask for bank details, sensitive ID numbers (i.e. passport), or any form of payment during the application or interview process. All official communication will come from an @airwallex.com email address. Please apply only through careers.airwallex.com or our official LinkedIn page.
Airwallex does not accept unsolicited resumes from search firms/recruiters. Airwallex will not pay any fees to search firms/recruiters if a candidate is submitted by a search firm/recruiter unless an agreement has been entered into with respect to specific open position(s). Search firms/recruiters submitting resumes to Airwallex on an unsolicited basis shall be deemed to accept this condition, regardless of any other provision to the contrary.
Equal opportunity
Airwallex is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We value diversity and anyone seeking employment at Airwallex is considered based on merit, qualifications, competence and talent. We don’t regard color, religion, race, national origin, sexual orientation, ancestry, citizenship, sex, marital or family status, disability, gender, or any other legally protected status when making our hiring decisions. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know.
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