Financial Crime Strategy Lead London (Hybrid)

About Morse

Our mission is to make sending and receiving money effortless, borderless, and instantaneous. Morse lets you pay anyone, anywhere, by name alone – no more worrying about IBANs, account numbers, or sort codes. Leveraging blockchain technology to settle transfers, we are currently available in over 150 countries.

Morse is the first product from Avian Labs Inc., backed by VCs like Union Square Ventures, Slow Ventures, and Ribbit Capital.

About the Role

As Financial Crime Strategy and Product Lead, you'll own the roadmap for how we detect and prevent financial crime — fraud, money laundering, and sanctions risk — across our markets. You'll set the strategy and standard for our fraud investigations, work with product/engineering to build tooling, and work closely with compliance to ensure that we’re managing activity across our platform.

This is a role for a data-driven operator who can move fluently between deep-dive analysis into emerging threats and the strategic, cross-functional work of turning those insights into a scalable detection system.

What you will do:

• Own the financial crime roadmap. Set and drive the strategy for how we detect and prevent fraud, money laundering, and sanctions risk — translating regulatory obligations and emerging threats into a prioritised, buildable plan.
• Manage controls with data, not instinct. Take ownership of our financial crime rulesets and controls, using data to decide what to ship, tune, or retire. Measure control performance (detection rates, false positives, precision) and continuously improve the balance between risk coverage and customer experience.
• Build the detection platform. Define the requirements for our fraud and AML detection systems and work hand-in-hand with engineering to build tooling that catches financial crime effectively and efficiently, without creating unnecessary friction for legitimate users.
• Run deep-dive investigations. Lead detailed analysis into suspected fraud and financial crime — identifying typologies, quantifying exposure, and turning what you find into new detection logic and controls.
• Turn threats into countermeasures. Stay ahead of evolving fraud and money laundering typologies across our markets, and design the rules, models, and workflows to counter them before they scale.
• Work across the company. Partner closely with product, engineering, data, operations, and compliance to make sure financial crime controls are built into the product — and communicate risk, trade-offs, and priorities clearly to both technical and senior audiences.
• Measure and report on what matters. Define the metrics that show whether our financial crime programme is working, and build the reporting that gives the business and leadership a clear view of risk and performance.

Who you are:

• A strong data and analytics background. You're a genuinely data-driven decision-maker — comfortable getting into the numbers yourself (SQL or similar), interrogating data to find patterns, and using evidence rather than instinct to decide what to build, tune, or retire.
• Deep investigative instinct. You can lead detailed analysis into suspected fraud and financial crime, quantify exposure, and translate what you find into concrete detection logic. You have a strong working knowledge of financial crime and fraud typologies and evolving threat patterns.
• Hands-on financial crime experience. You've managed a fraud or financial crime ruleset before, and you understand what it takes to move from individual rules to a proper detection platform. You know the difference between catching crime and creating noise.
• Financial crime product exposure. You've built or shaped financial crime and fraud capabilities — whether as a product manager for a fraud/fincrime product, or by collaborating closely with a product team to deliver detection tooling and controls. Ideally, you will have worked in payments, fintech, or crypto and are familiar with financial crime risks in these sectors.
• Strategic and project ownership. You can think strategically and own delivery — setting a roadmap, prioritising ruthlessly, and driving work through to completion across multiple teams.
• Excellent communication and cross-functional collaboration. You can work effectively across product, engineering, data, operations, and compliance, and communicate risk and trade-offs clearly to both technical teams and senior stakeholders.
• Familiarity with regulatory environments. Specifically for the US, EU, and/or UK.

Nice to haves

• Familiarity with transaction monitoring and financial crime tooling such as Sardine, Orca, Chainalysis, or similar.
• Experience in the LATAM payments market, or broader global/emerging-markets exposure.
• Understanding of AML and sanctions obligations and how they translate into operational controls.