Head of Financial Crime Service Delivery

Your mission

You'll lead the global service delivery function that keeps our Financial Crime Operations brilliant and running at scale. This is a senior, strategic role: you're designing and owning the operating model end-to-end to let a high-volume, globally distributed operation deliver consistent and compliant outcomes. 

You're here to build something that scales: defining how we perform, how we measure success, and how we adapt a global model to local needs without losing speed or consistency. You'll hold the tension between global standardisation and regional effectiveness, ensuring what works at 300 people still holds at 600.

This is about designing for complexity and delivering simplicity, in true Wise fashion.

What you'll be doing

You will direct a geographically distributed team, serving as the strategic bridge between regional execution and enterprise-wide priorities. This is a high-accountability position with substantial scope, where you will function as the operational cornerstone of the function. Your mandate encompasses SLA governance, KPI optimisation, localisation strategy, capacity planning, and the cultivation of high-performing strategic partnerships.

Global Service Delivery

• Own execution across all sites, queues, and markets: throughput, SLA delivery, and capacity planning are yours
• Coordinate hiring timelines, headcount tracking, and coverage plans across geographies, underpinned by robust forecasting that accounts for variable and unpredictable business condition
• Provide input into location decisions: site capacity, cost, risk concentration, and inter-site dependencies
• Balance capacity across regions, share best practice, and maintain consistent ways of working globally
• Turn QC insights into actionable feedback loops for improvements

Change and Transformation

• Lead significant change programmes inside the ops function: system changes and structural reorganisation
• Approach change management as a discipline, not just a communication exercise

Operating Model and Performance

• Manage both a global centre of excellence layer and regional delivery teams at the same time, resolving the tension between standardisation and local fit structurally
• Set meaningful targets at team, regional, and global level, and build the cadence to track and act on them
• Own escalation protocols, to ensure the function runs with consistency and professionalism everywhere it operates
• Own operational health reporting: surfacing risks, blockers, and magnitude issues in real time to senior leadership

Coordination and Stakeholder Management

• Act as the coordination layer between various layers of the business to align on shared priorities and resolve cross-team challenges
• Support regional leads with stakeholder management and own escalation coordination where needed

People, Culture and Building Leadership Capability

• Build a leadership layer that operates with maturity, consistency, and high standards: leads who own their teams, manage performance confidently, and don't need hand-holding to make good calls
• Establish clear expectations for what great leadership looks like at every level, and hold the line on those standards across all sites
• Use your leads as your primary lens into operational health: building the trust, cadence, and rigour needed to get accurate signal from the ground up
• Identify gaps in leadership capability early and act on them: coaching where there's potential, making harder calls where there isn't
• Own team culture, and site environment across locations
• Own organisational structure and workforce strategy, including redesign initiatives, capability planning, and role architecture; escalate and resolve people issues while ensuring recruitment and role scoping align with functional growth and strategic direction.
• Lead internal communications, organisational updates, and engagement initiatives; translate strategic decisions, including difficult or unpopular ones, into clear, credible messaging that maintains trust and alignment across teams.
• Create the conditions for leads to grow into genuinely strong people managers — not just operators — so the function stops being dependent on heroics and starts running on structure