Customer Due Diligence Team Lead

About Clear Street:

Clear Street is modernising the brokerage ecosystem. Founded in 2018, Clear Street is a diversified financial services firm, replacing the legacy infrastructure used across capital markets.

We started from scratch by building a completely cloud-native clearing and custody system designed for today’s complex, global market. Clear Street’s proprietary prime brokerage platform adds significant efficiency to the market, while focusing on minimising risk, redundancy, and cost for clients. Our goal is to create a single source-of-truth platform for every asset class, in every country, and in any currency.

By combining highly-skilled product and engineering talent with seasoned finance professionals, we are building the essentials to compete in today’s fast-paced markets.

The Role:

The Customer Due Diligence (CDD) Team Lead will work with the MLRO and the DMLRO to ensure that risk-based customer, counterparty and vendor KYC is undertaken in accordance with legislative, regulatory, best practice and internal standards. This will involve conducting and supervising reviews at the onboarding stage, at periodic refresh and following a trigger event. It will also involve providing guidance to CDD team members in relation to how more complex situations should be addressed and will also involve the authority to approve KYC for a number of account types. This role will fulfill a core function in relation to upholding the CSUK financial crime risk management framework.

This is an excellent opportunity for those wanting to contribute within a fast-paced financial technology environment. 

Responsibilities:

• Undertake and supervise counterparty outreach to obtain necessary CDD documentation.
• Undertake and supervise desk-based reviews to obtain counterparty CDD documentation.
• Undertake and supervise counterparty screening to identify alerts for politically exposed persons, sanctions matches and adverse media; disposition or escalate screening alerts as necessary.
• Allocate and challenge counterparty risk ratings.
• Undertake and supervise client categorisation under MIFID II.
• Keep up to date with developments in CDD legislation, regulation, best practice and internal requirements.
• Suggest enhancements to internal CDD processes and procedures.
• Liaise with the Business to provide updates on the status of individual CDD reviews.
• Provide management information on the progress of individual CDD reviews.
• Undertake ad hoc projects to support the overall financial crime and CDD control framework.
• Liaise with counterparties to provide them with relevant client onboarding documentation and ensure this is completed correctly.
• Respond to reverse KYC questions.
• Undertake, document and supervise enhanced due diligence reviews.
• Ensure that accounts are offboarded in accordance with internal procedures.
• Keep thorough records of all work undertaken to ensure the integrity of the audit trail.
• Guide CDD team members, and CSUK employees, on relevant CDD requirements. 
• Identify red flags that arise as part of the onboard or refresh process and escalate these as appropriate.
• Approve KYC files completed by others.
• Undertake ad hoc project work as required to contribute to the wider CSUK financial crime control framework.

Skills required:

• Five years of experience in a CDD role within the wholesale financial services industry.
• Solid understanding of UK and international financial crime legislation, regulation and best practice, including the Money Laundering Regulations, the FCA Financial Crime Guide for Firms, JMLSG, Wolfsberg documentation etc.
• Experience of onboarding complex and high-risk clients, including offshore entities, hedge funds unregulated corporates and politically exposed persons.
• Excellent analytical, problem-solving, and decision-making skills.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.
• Proficiency in Microsoft Office Suite.
• Confidence to deal with colleagues at all levels of the organisation. 
• Experience of working with screening software such as World-Check.
• Degree in Business, Finance, Law or a related field.
• (Preferred) Professional qualifications in financial crime management preferred such as CAMS certification.

We Offer:

At Clear Street, we offer competitive compensation packages, company equity, pension, gender neutral parental leave, and full medical and dental insurance. Our belief has always been that we are better as a business when we are all together in person. As such, we are requiring employees to be in the office a minimum of three days per week.

Our top priority is our people. We’re continuously investing in a culture that promotes collaboration. We help each other through challenges and celebrate each other's successes. We believe that modern workplaces succeed by virtue of having high-performance workforces that are diverse — in ideas, in cultures, and in experiences. We put in the effort to make such a workplace a daily reality and are proud to be an equal opportunity employer

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