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Compliance, risk & financial crime recruitment

MLROs, compliance leadership and financial crime specialists — including regulator-approved and controlled-function appointments.

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Compliance hiring carries consequences that most functions do not. A regulated appointment can be rejected by the regulator, and a weak financial crime hire surfaces as an enforcement issue long after the hiring decision.

We recruit across compliance leadership, financial crime, sanctions, fraud and regulatory risk for fintechs, payment companies and financial institutions.

What we understand about this market

Published so you can assess our domain knowledge before the first call, rather than after it.

  • Approved and controlled functions, and that regulator approval is part of the hiring timeline, not an afterthought
  • MLRO responsibilities in substance: SAR/STR decisioning, escalation, board reporting and personal accountability
  • AML programme design: risk assessment, CDD and EDD, ongoing monitoring, PEP handling
  • Transaction monitoring in practice — rule tuning, alert-to-case ratios, false-positive burden, model validation
  • Sanctions screening, list management, fuzzy matching and screening-quality assurance
  • KYB for merchant and business onboarding, UBO verification and complex ownership structures
  • Fraud typologies across cards, APP fraud, account takeover and mule detection
  • Regime differences across the UK, EU, DIFC/ADGM and MAS — approvals are not portable between them

What we screen for

The signals that separate candidates who have done the job from candidates who can describe it.

Regulatory approval history and portability

We establish which regimes a candidate has actually held an approved role in. An approval in one jurisdiction does not transfer to another, and this materially affects your timeline.

Judgement, not just framework knowledge

We ask about a decision they made against commercial pressure. Financial crime hires are ultimately a judgement hire, and framework recall does not predict it.

Builder or maintainer?

Running an established programme at a bank and standing one up at a pre-licence fintech are different jobs. We screen explicitly for which one the candidate has done.

Where these hires go wrong

  • Starting the MLRO search too late and letting regulatory approval become the critical path to launch.
  • Hiring a compliance officer to satisfy a licence condition without the authority or seniority to enforce anything.
  • Assuming an approval in one jurisdiction carries to another.
  • Treating transaction monitoring as a tooling problem when the constraint is analyst capacity and tuning.

Frequently asked

Do you recruit MLROs and other regulated appointments?
Yes. We recruit MLROs, deputy MLROs, heads of compliance and other controlled or approved functions. We factor regulator approval into the hiring plan from the start, because it usually sits on the critical path.
How long does an MLRO hire take?
The search itself is often not the constraint — regulatory approval is, and it varies by jurisdiction and regulator. We will set expectations against your specific regime at the briefing stage rather than quoting a generic timeline.

Hiring a role that generalist recruiters keep getting wrong?

Send us the brief. We will tell you honestly whether we are the right people for it, what the market looks like, and what it will take to hire.

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