About Paystack

Over the past nine years, Paystack has established itself as a pioneer in African fintech with a mission to help merchants get paid by anyone, anywhere in the world. Processing over $300 million in monthly transactions, our modern payments infrastructure supports tens of thousands of notable corporations, including MTN, Bolt, and Domino’s Pizza. As Paystack enters a phase of accelerated growth, we are seeking a Financial Crime Manager to own, design, and scale our fraud and AML detection capabilities. This role sits within the Compliance Operations team, carrying end-to-end accountability for ensuring our financial crime processes are robust, domain-accurate, and scalable across multiple markets. This is a hands-on leadership role where you will define operational strategies, guide system design, and directly influence how financial crime risk is managed at Paystack while leading and developing high-performing fraud and AML teams.

What You’ll Do

As the Financial Crime Manager, you will lead our fraud and AML detection operations from end-to-end. You will partner with product and engineering to evolve system capabilities while leading a high-performing team of specialists to deliver high-quality risk outcomes. By combining deep domain expertise with operational leadership, you will ensure Paystack remains a safe and trusted payments platform.

You will be accountable for:

• Informing the product roadmap for our monitoring, alerting, and case management tools.

• The quality and effectiveness of fraud and AML monitoring logic and detection scenarios.

• The operating model and performance of the Financial Crime Monitoring teams

• Translating risk, regulatory, and business requirements into robust, scalable detection systems

• Driving operational excellence by using data and metrics to manage team capacity and performance.

Key Responsibilities

1. Financial Crime Oversight

   • Own the end-to-end fraud and AML detection domain, ensuring alignment between prevention, detection, investigation, and remediation.

   • Apply deep understanding of fraud typologies, AML/CTF risks, sanctions, and regulatory expectations to detection design.

   • Manage the Fraud and AML operational teams (specialists and first-line managers) to ensure adequate coverage, capability and day-to-day execution.

   • Translate regulatory, partner, and audit requirements into scalable technical and operational controls.

   • Stay ahead of evolving financial crime patterns, market-specific risks, and regulatory developments across Paystack’s footprint.

2. Financial Crime Capabilities

   • Design and optimise systems, logic, scenarios, and thresholds used to identify financial crime.

   • Ensure adequate coverage and capability across the team to meet growing transaction volumes.

   • Apply a deep understanding of fraud typologies, AML/CTF risks, and sanctions to the design of our controls.

   • Establish feedback loops between investigation outcomes and detection strategies to improve signal quality.

   • Maintain auditable documentation of detection logic, business assumptions, and strategy changes.

   • Measure and manage detection performance using quantitative metrics (precision, recall, false positives, alert-to-case conversion, loss metrics).

3. Team Leadership & Development

   • Manage and mentor the Fraud and AML operational teams, including specialists and first-line managers.

   • Set clear direction, provide coaching, and oversee performance management to ensure high-quality execution.

4. Operational Excellence

   • Build and improve SLAs, KPIs, and quality frameworks across all Financial Crime teams.

   • Use performance metrics to manage team capacity and ensure efficient investigation outcomes.

   • Balance speed, quality, and regulatory expectations with a focus on maintaining a positive customer experience.

5. Cross-functional Collaboration

   • Partner with Product and Engineering teams to define requirements for monitoring, alerting, and case management tools.

   • Work closely with Legal, Compliance, and Risk to ensure alignment with regulatory obligations.

   • Collaborate with the Data team to optimise rule effectiveness and performance.

   • Support audits, partner reviews, and regulatory engagements as a subject matter expert.

   • Provide clear updates to senior stakeholders on operational performance, risks, and emerging issues

Who We’re Looking For

Required

• 7+ years in financial crime roles in payments, fintech, banking, or financial services.

• Proven experience designing, building, and tuning risk detection systems (fraud, AML, or similar).

• Experience in measuring and optimising detection performance using quantitative metrics.

• Strong systems thinking: able to design scalable, maintainable monitoring frameworks rather than one-off rules.

• Deep understanding of financial crime typologies, fraud patterns, AML/CTF requirements, and regulatory obligations.

• Experience operating within fraud, AML, risk, or compliance functions in payments, fintech, or financial services.

• Proven experience leading and developing teams, including setting direction, coaching, and performance management.

• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders.

• High ownership mindset and comfort operating in ambiguous, high-growth environments.

Preferred

• Familiarity with monitoring platforms, alerting systems, transaction screening, and case management tools.

• Fintech industry certifications such as ACAMS, ICA, CFE, CFCS, or similar.

Why This Role Matters

This role is foundational to Paystack’s ability to scale safely. You will define how financial crime detection works at Paystack, combining strong technical systems with sound domain judgment. Success in this role directly protects customers, merchants, partners, and the broader financial ecosystem while enabling Paystack’s continued growth across Africa and beyond.