New Business Intake Manager in London

The Compliance and Risk (C&R) Team is based in London and led by the firm’s General Counsel. The C&R Team advises the firm on all aspects of its legal and regulatory duties, including financial crime compliance, SRA STaRS, risk management, client engagement terms, complaints and claims, internal investigations, insurance, governance, external vendor contracts and data privacy. The legal team currently comprises 9 lawyers including the Director of Compliance & MLCO, and 2 paralegals.

Within the C&R Team sits the New Business Intake (NBI) function under the Director of Compliance and led by the Head of NBI. This comprises 3 NBI Managers, 21 Analysts and 4 Assistants in London and 3 AML Managers based in Europe, the Middle East and Asia. The NBI team handles all aspects of on-boarding new clients and ongoing client monitoring where required, including client due diligence (CDD), sanctions checks and conflict checking for the entire firm. The NBI team’s objective is to on board new clients and matters as efficiently as possible whilst ensuring that all regulatory requirements are met. The NBI Manager will assist the Head of NBI and Director of Compliance in driving the delivery of a quality service to the business. They will be responsible for a team and ensuring a high-quality, tailored and pragmatic service is delivered by them and their team to specific divisions of the business.

Roles and Responsibilities

• Supervising CDD checks carried out by other members of the NBI team and providing advice to the wider firm (in relation to both new clients and refresher checks performed on existing clients)
• Ensuring your team is delivering a quality and timely service and dealing with any escalations
• Being a key decision maker for your team in relation to appropriateness of CDD and compliance with applicable regulations
• When necessary, carrying out CDD checks on a wide range of clients (for all CRS offices)
• Escalating high-profile or high risk matters to senior members of the team
• Liaising with clients directly about a wide range of CDD issues
• Assisting with relevant training for the NBI team and other business support staff such as Finance or Client Services
• Overseeing the NBI process and ensure that it runs efficiently
• Ensuring that all necessary adverse media and sanctions screening is performed properly and that potential matches are escalated where necessary
• Assisting with audit, ongoing monitoring and quality control measures.
• Identifying and escalating potential conflicts issues
• Supervising the conflict checking process to ensure the checks are performed accurately
• Assisting with developing new Compliance policies/ strategies
• Keeping up-to-date with publications about law firm risk management issues and highlighting changes in the law to the team
• Participating in other projects within the Compliance & Risk team as and when they arise.

Team Management

• Role model, and actively manage your team to ensure they demonstrate our firm’s values and behaviours
• Accountable for day-to-day line management of a mixture of Senior Analysts and Analysts including training, managing performance and conducting regular 1 2 1s and appraisals
• Acting as a first port of call for any CDD or conflicts queries raised by the team
• Acting as a mentor to your team and others to assist with continuous development
• Ensuring that effective systems are in place for distributing and prioritising work
• Promote knowledge sharing within the team
• Comply with all relevant legal and regulatory obligations including the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) Standards and Regulations, and Principles.

Skills and Experience

• The successful candidate will have strong technical knowledge of applicable AML legislation with at least 3+ years’ relevant law firm experience and a passion for financial crime compliance
• An experienced people manager who is able to adapt their management style to different individuals with at least 2 years’ demonstrable experience of driving successful performance
• Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills
• A confident and assertive communicator, with the ability to build good relationships with clients, partners, fee earners and business support staff
• Ability to train and develop others
• Be able to work under pressure and manage conflicting priorities and deadlines in a high pressure environment
• Conscientious and methodical with excellent attention to detail
• Must be willing to work in an agile manner, including working from our UK regional offices when required
• Strong written and verbal communication skills with the ability to deal with clients, partners, fee earners and support staff
• Highly organised and capable of managing conflicting priorities & deadlines

Working together

• Integrity and respect
• Inclusive
• Personal impact and growth
• Driving high standards
• Client - centric
• Responsible Business

We adopt a hybrid and flexible working approach, dependent on the requirements of the role and subject to manager approval.