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About the Role

This Second Line of Defence role provides oversight, challenge, and strategic advice across the Payments Acquiring business. You will help shape the financial crime framework supporting merchant relationships, manage emerging risks, and enable sustainable business growth. The role acts as a trusted advisor on complex financial crime matters, influences key business decisions, oversees change initiatives and remediation programmes, and drives enhancements to policies, controls, and risk management practices.

Responsibilities

Provide expert Financial Crime advice, oversight and challenge to the Merchant Acquiring business across strategic initiatives, customer onboarding, customer lifecycle management and product development.
Serve as a recognised subject matter expert on Merchant Acquiring Financial Crime risks, advising senior stakeholders on emerging threats, regulatory developments and risk management practices.
Lead the interpretation and implementation of Financial Crime policies, standards and regulatory requirements, ensuring alignment with Barclays risk appetite and regulatory expectations.
Review and challenge complex merchant onboarding decisions, policy exceptions, high-risk customer escalations and remediation activities.
Provide Financial Crime oversight of major business change programmes, ensuring risks are identified, assessed and appropriately mitigated.
Analyse Financial Crime metrics, incidents, control performance and industry trends to identify emerging risks and opportunities for control enhancement.
Drive improvements to Financial Crime frameworks, customer risk methodologies, governance processes and control environments.
Produce high-quality management information, thematic reviews and risk insight papers for senior leadership, governance forums and committees.
Build strong partnerships across the business to influence decision making and promote a culture of proactive risk management.
Identification and assessment of compliance risks through thorough reviews of business activities, changes, processes, testing and systems.
Identification and investigation of potential market abuse, including but not limited to, Insider Dealing, Unlawful Disclosure, Market Manipulation or Anti-Competitive Conduct.
Conduct investigation of compliance risk events or breaches.
Oversight and check and challenge of corrective actions and preventative measures to avoid future occurrences.
Implementation of compliance policies and procedures in line with regulatory requirements and ensuring that the bank’s internal policies are aligned with international standards, including jurisdictional requirements.
Collaboration with 1LOD, other relevant Compliance teams and legal, and relevant risk management functions to facilitate a comprehensive approach to compliance and risk management.
Identification, investigation and oversight of potential money laundering, terrorist financing or other financial crime.
Contribute or set strategy, drive requirements and make recommendations for change.
Plan resources, budgets, and policies.
Manage and maintain policies/ processes.
Deliver continuous improvements and escalate breaches of policies/procedures.
Advise key stakeholders, including functional leadership teams and senior management on functional and cross functional areas of impact and alignment.
Manage and mitigate risks through assessment, in support of the control and governance agenda.
Demonstrate leadership and accountability for managing risk and strengthening controls in relation to the work your team does.
Demonstrate comprehensive understanding of the organisation functions to contribute to achieving the goals of the business.
Collaborate with other areas of work, for business aligned support areas to keep up to speed with business activity and the business strategies.
Create solutions based on sophisticated analytical thought comparing and selecting complex alternatives.
In-depth analysis with interpretative thinking will be required to define problems and develop innovative solutions.
Adopt and include the outcomes of extensive research in problem solving processes.
Seek out, build and maintain trusting relationships and partnerships with internal and external stakeholders in order to accomplish key business objectives, using influencing and negotiating skills to achieve outcomes.

Requirements

Significant Financial Crime experience within banking, payments or financial services.
Deep Merchant Acquiring experience is essential, with a strong understanding of merchant onboarding, payment acceptance, card acquiring, customer lifecycle management and associated Financial Crime risks.
Extensive knowledge of AML, Sanctions, Anti-Bribery & Corruption and broader Financial Crime regulatory requirements.
Demonstrable experience operating within a Second Line Financial Crime, Compliance or Risk function.
Strong ability to provide effective challenge whilst maintaining constructive relationships with senior stakeholders.
Experience overseeing complex remediation programmes, regulatory reviews and control enhancement initiatives.
Advanced analytical skills with the ability to interpret complex data sets and translate them into meaningful risk insights and actions.
Exceptional stakeholder management, influencing and communication skills.
Experience supporting Merchant Acquiring businesses.
Knowledge of card scheme rules, marketplace and payment facilitator models, and higher-risk merchant segments.
Demonstrate leadership and accountability for managing risk and strengthening controls in relation to the work your team does.
Demonstrate comprehensive understanding of the organisation functions to contribute to achieving the goals of the business.
Collaborate with other areas of work, for business aligned support areas to keep up to speed with business activity and the business strategies.
Create solutions based on sophisticated analytical thought comparing and selecting complex alternatives.
In-depth analysis with interpretative thinking will be required to define problems and develop innovative solutions.
Adopt and include the outcomes of extensive research in problem solving processes.
Seek out, build and maintain trusting relationships and partnerships with internal and external stakeholders in order to accomplish key business objectives, using influencing and negotiating skills to achieve outcomes.
All colleagues will be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Values of Respect, Integrity, Service, Excellence and Stewardship.
They will also be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Mindset – to Empower, Challenge and Drive.

Skills

Merchant Acquiring
Financial Crime
AML
Sanctions
Anti-Bribery & Corruption
Risk Management
Stakeholder Management
Influencing
Communication
Analytical Skills
Data Analysis
Problem Solving
Negotiation
Data-led expert oversight
Check and challenge
Compliance risks
Market abuse
Compliance risk events
Compliance policies and procedures
Risk management functions
Financial crime
Strategy
Resource planning
Budget management
Policy management
Process management
Continuous improvement
Leadership behaviours
Subject matter expert
Technical direction
Team guidance
Coaching
Strategic decisions
Risk mitigation
Control and governance
Sophisticated analytical thought
Interpretative thinking
Research
Relationship building
Partnership building
Influencing skills
Negotiating skills
Risk and controls
Change and transformation
Business acumen
Strategic thinking
Digital and technology
Job-specific technical skills

Location

London
Northampton

Work Type

Full-time

Experience Level

Vice President
Experienced

Education Level

ICA
ACAMS
Equivalent professional qualifications

About the Company

Barclays’ payments acceptance business provides critical infrastructure to the UK economy, processing billions of pounds of payments annually for both small businesses and domestic and international corporate clients.
In April 2025, we announced a long-term partnership with Brookfield Asset Management to grow and transform the payments acceptance business by broadening the range of services offered, enhancing the experience for both existing and prospective clients.
Leveraging extensive client relationships and deep experience of UK payments, we will create an environment of continuous innovation - activated by Brookfield’s global private equity expertise in payments, technology, operational transformation and corporate carve-outs - to ensure the business is strategically positioned for long-term growth.
Barclays will invest approximately £400m in the new business, the majority of which will be incurred during the first three years.
Performance-linked incentives will drive greater alignment between the partners, underpinning the long-term commitment to the transformation.
Barclays and Brookfield will work to create a standalone entity over time, continuing to use the Barclaycard Payments brand and acting as the sole payments acceptance services provider to Barclays’ clients for a minimum of ten years.
For more information on our partnership with Brookfield (programme ‘Gaia’), please visit Barclays.com.