Transaction Monitoring Specialist
The Transaction Monitoring Specialist sits at the intersection of financial crime detection and payment operations: monitoring transaction flows in real time, reconciling fiat and crypto movements as they settle, keeping liquidity available across banking rails, PSPs, exchanges and wallets, and acting as first responder when payment flows degrade.
This is a hands-on operational role for someone comfortable making decisions quickly on live money movement, and equally comfortable documenting why those decisions were made.
What You’ll Be Doing
Monitor transactions and manage alerts: monitor fiat and crypto transactions in real time, investigate anomalies and suspicious activity, review alerts from transaction monitoring, sanctions screening, and blockchain analytics tools, and escalate cases to Compliance/MLRO when required.
Perform payment reconciliation: reconcile internal ledgers with banks, PSPs, card acquirers, exchanges, and on-chain records; investigate and resolve breaks, unmatched items, duplicates, failed settlements, and other discrepancies.
Manage reconciliation exceptions and customer-impacting issues: maintain the exception log, drive root-cause analysis and resolution, and support refunds, returns, chargebacks, misdirected deposits, and fund recovery.
Manage liquidity and positions: monitor fiat and crypto balances across accounts and platforms, execute funding, rebalancing, and sweep instructions, and identify liquidity shortfalls, concentration risks, and settlement timing mismatches.
Handle payment incidents and operational issues: detect, triage, escalate, and track incidents through resolution; monitor payment provider and blockchain network health and take mitigating actions when necessary.
Maintain operational processes and partner relationships: keep runbooks, playbooks, checklists, and escalation procedures up to date and act as an operational point of contact for banking, PSP, and exchange partners.
Prepare operational reporting: produce regular MI covering transaction volumes, success/failure rates, alerts, reconciliation breaks, incidents, and liquidity utilization, providing reliable data for Finance and Treasury.
Drive continuous improvement: identify recurring manual work and operational issues, propose automation and control improvements, and work with Product and Engineering to implement and test process improvements.
Qualifications You Will Bring
3 years of relevant experience in payment operations, transaction monitoring, AML/financial crime operations, settlement, or treasury within payments, fintech, crypto, or banking.
Strong understanding of payment rails: SEPA / SEPA Instant, SWIFT, Faster Payments, local ACH schemes, card acquiring, and open banking.
Working knowledge of crypto operations: major blockchains, stablecoins, wallet structures, transaction tracing, confirmation/finality, and network/gas fees.
Understanding of AML/CTF and sanctions requirements for virtual assets, including KYC/CDD, PEP and sanctions screening, source of funds, Travel Rule, SAR/STR escalation, MiCA, and local VASP requirements.
Strong reconciliation and control mindset: comfortable working with ledgers, debits/credits, settlement cycles, cut-offs, and transaction discrepancies.
Strong analytical and investigative skills: ability to work with raw transaction data, identify root causes, reach defensible conclusions, and clearly document findings.
Advanced Excel/Google Sheets and preferably SQL: able to analyse large volumes of transaction and operational data.
High attention to detail, sound judgement, and strong communication skills: able to work under time pressure, handle sensitive financial data with discretion, and communicate clearly in written and spoken English.
Nice-to-Have
Experience with blockchain analytics, transaction monitoring, and sanctions screening tools.
Experience in crypto/virtual asset operations, particularly with stablecoins, on-chain investigations, and multiple blockchain networks.
Experience with payment incident management and operational controls, including developing runbooks, escalation procedures, and process improvements.
Experience working with automation, SQL-based reporting, or operational data analysis to reduce manual work and improve reconciliation and monitoring processes.