Compliance Director

ABOUT THE ROLE

We're looking for a Compliance Director to own group compliance across every

regulated entity we operate - setting the framework, holding the regulatory

relationships, and making sure not a single obligation or deadline is missed

anywhere in the group.

You will oversee the MLROs and local compliance leads in each licensed entity,

functionally rather than by title alone: you set the standard they work to, you

review what they produce, and you are accountable to the CEO for the group's

overall compliance posture.

This is a senior role for someone who has already been the accountable person -

a Head of Compliance or MLRO at a regulated payments business - and knows exactly

what a regulator expects to see when they ask.

WHAT YOU'LL OWN

Group compliance framework

- Own the group-wide AML/CFT, sanctions and regulatory compliance framework, and

translate it into what each entity must do locally.

- Set the standard, the minimum controls and the reporting cadence that every

regulated entity works to.

- Design and maintain the compliance and risk structure itself - how the

function is organised across entities, where accountability sits, what

escalates and to whom.

- Advise the CEO and the business on compliance and risk structure decisions:

new products, new markets, new partners, changes to the licensing footprint.

Oversight of MLROs and local compliance

- Provide functional oversight of the MLRO and compliance lead in each regulated

entity.

- Review and challenge their risk assessments, alert handling, SAR/STR

decisions, and regulatory filings before they go out.

- Run a regular oversight cadence - reporting lines, escalation paths, group

compliance committee, and a consolidated view of risk across entities.

- Coach and develop the local compliance leads. Where an entity is

under-resourced or a control is weak, you say so early and fix it.

Regulatory obligations and deadlines - non-negotiable

- Own a complete, live inventory of every regulatory obligation across every

entity and jurisdiction: what is due, to whom, when, and who prepares it.

- Own on-time, accurate delivery of all periodic regulatory reporting and

submissions across the group.

- Own incident, breach and material-change notifications to regulators, filed

within the required window.

- NO MISSED REGULATORY DEADLINES. This is the hard line of the role. You build

the tracking, the buffers and the escalation that make missing one

structurally difficult.

Regulatory relationships

- Be the group's primary point of contact for regulators.

- Handle regulator queries, information requests, thematic reviews and

inspections directly - draft the responses, manage the timeline, close them

out.

- Track regulatory change across all our jurisdictions and translate it into

concrete action before it becomes a compliance gap.

- Prepare the CEO and the board for regulatory engagement, and represent the

company credibly on your own.

Policy

- Own the full compliance policy suite - AML/CFT, sanctions, KYC/KYB and CDD,

transaction monitoring, merchant acceptance and prohibited activity,

complaints, outsourcing, safeguarding-adjacent controls.

- Keep policies current against regulatory change, and make sure changes

actually land in operational procedure and system configuration, not just in

the document.

- Run the annual review and approval cycle, with a clear audit trail of what

changed, why and when.

Audit and assurance

- Own the independent AML/CFT audit and any other compliance audits or external

reviews - scope, timeline, evidence, and the auditor relationship.

- Manage external auditors, consultants and assurance providers across entities.

- Own remediation of audit and regulator findings end to end. Findings get

closed with evidence, on the committed date.

- Maintain the control testing and evidence trail that makes the framework

defensible under examination.

Guidance to the business

- Be the person the CEO, Sales, Risk and Product come to before they do

something, not after.

- Give clear, commercially aware answers - what we can do, what we can't, and

what conditions make a "no" into a "yes".

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

Required

- Prior experience as Head of Compliance, MLRO, or Compliance Officer of record

at a regulated payments, e-money or financial institution. This is not a first

accountable-person role.

- Deep working knowledge of AML/CFT and payments regulation, with real depth in

at least one major regime and demonstrated ability to get up to speed on

others.

- Track record of owning a regulatory reporting calendar across multiple

obligations without misses.

- Direct experience handling regulator engagement - queries, inspections,

thematic reviews - as the named contact.

- Experience managing external auditors and closing out audit and regulator

findings.

- Experience overseeing or managing compliance staff, ideally across more than

one entity or jurisdiction.

- Has personally written and defended compliance policy, not just inherited it.

- Hands-on and detailed. You read the alerts, the filings and the audit evidence

yourself.

- Based in Singapore with existing right to work.

Strongly preferred

- Experience across more than one of: MAS (Payment Services Act), BNM, BSP,

AUSTRAC, HKMA/CSP, US state MTL or FinCEN MSB.

- Experience in a group structure where local entities operate under different

licences or through acquirer/partner arrangements.

- Fitness-and-propriety approval history with a regulator, or clear ability to

obtain it.

- ICA, CAMS, or equivalent professional certification.

- Merchant-acquiring or marketplace payments background - merchant onboarding

risk, prohibited MCCs, transaction monitoring at merchant level.

- Comfortable with data. You can interrogate monitoring output and merchant

portfolios yourself rather than waiting for a report.

How you work

- Deadlines are absolute. You build in buffer and escalate early rather than

explaining a miss afterwards.

- You bring a position, not just a risk. "No" comes with a route to "yes"

wherever one legitimately exists.

- You are direct with the CEO and with regulators, and you don't soften a real

problem.

- You are comfortable building the function while running it.

WHY THIS ROLE

You'll own group compliance for a licensed payments business operating across

multiple regulated markets, reporting directly to the CEO with a seat in the

decisions that shape the licensing footprint and product roadmap. The scope -

multiple regimes, multiple entities, direct regulator ownership - is broader

than an equivalent title at a single-market institution.