Job Description

Company Mission

Payhawk is a leading global spend management solution for scaling businesses. Headquartered in London and combining company cards, reimbursable expenses and accounts payable into a single product; its future-facing technology enables finance teams to control and automate company spending at scale.

The Payhawk customer base includes fast-growing and mature multinational companies in 32 countries including LuxAir and Wagestream. With offices in New York, London, Berlin, Munich , Barcelona, Paris, Amsterdam, Vilnius and Sofia; Payhawk is backed by renowned investors such as Lightspeed Venture Partners, Greenoaks, QED Investors, Bek Ventures and Eleven Ventures.

Our values include supporting flat hierarchies, taking ownership and responsibility, seeking and providing feedback, managing constructive critique, and speaking our minds. We understand that the best ideas don’t all come from the same place, so we encourage diversity and inclusion in all areas of our work.

The future of fintech is about more than money, it is about continual learning and empowered teams. We’re also on a journey to measure and improve our environmental and social impact. From virtual cards to digital subscriptions, our software and automation help take paper out of the equation for our customers, too.

We’re changing the world of payments, and we’re looking for an exceptional team to help us.

About the Role

This is not the KYC analyst role you have seen advertised elsewhere.

We have spent the last two years building the automation: document intake, extraction, translation, validation and completeness checking, screening triage, risk scoring, onboarding note generation. The machine now does a large share of the data work. What it cannot do is judgement, calibration, and knowing when the answer in front of you is wrong.

So we are hiring for the thinking, not the CV. You will own corporate onboarding cases end to end, working alongside AI tooling rather than around it, deciding what a complex ownership structure actually means, what we genuinely need from a customer versus what we have always asked for, and how to get a business live faster without lowering the bar.

You will report into the KYC Team Lead and work closely with the Director of Compliance, our onboarding engineers, and Sales. If you have a background in AML or KYC, good. If you do not, and you are sharp, fast and hungry, we will teach you. We would rather coach compliance into a brilliant thinker than coach thinking into an experienced one.

Responsibilities

• Own corporate client applications end to end, across all our markets, from first review to decision.
• Analyse complex corporate structures and international documentation, and work out what the structure really tells you about risk.
• Run PEP, sanctions and adverse media screening on applicants, companies and their representatives, and resolve alerts with a clear rationale.
• Use our AI and automation tooling as your default working method, check its output rigorously, and tell us where it is wrong so we refine it further.
• Challenge what we ask customers for. If a document adds no risk value, say so and make the case.
• Escalate potentially fraudulent activity to the MLRO with a tight, evidence-led write-up.
• Work directly with customers and Account Executives to move cases forward, rather than waiting for a thread to update.
• Hit and beat throughput and quality targets, and help the team do the same.
• Bring ideas that change how the function works, not just how your own queue works.

Requirements

• Strong reasoning ability. You can hold a messy, ambiguous problem in your head, break it into parts, and reach a defensible answer without someone handing you a checklist.
• Excellent written and spoken English. You can explain a decision plainly to a customer and defend the same decision to an auditor.
• Genuinely AI native. You already use AI daily in how you work, you know what it is good and bad at, and you treat a wrong output as something to diagnose rather than a reason to go back to doing it by hand.
• Target driven. You want to know what good looks like, you want to beat it, and you find the numbers motivating rather than oppressive.
• Inventive. You look at a process and see the eleven steps that could be three, and you do something about it.
• Willing to learn compliance properly, including the regulation and the reasoning behind the rules, and to be assessed on it. Prior AML, KYC or KYB experience is welcome but not required.
• Judgement and ownership under uncertainty. You would rather make a reasoned call and be accountable for it than wait to be told. You know when to escalate, you escalate with a recommendation rather than a question, and you can always show your working.
• Comfortable talking to customers. Much of this role is a service role as well as a control role.
• Ownership and entrepreneurship, positive attitude, energy, openness to feedback, comfortable with a fast-changing environment.
• Team-oriented with strong interpersonal skills.
• A degree in any discipline, or equivalent evidence that you learn quickly and think rigorously.

Nice to have

• Experience in a regulated financial services, fintech or professional services environment.
• Exposure to AML, KYC, KYB, fraud, audit or forensic work.
• Additional European languages.
• Any history of building your own tools, scripts, prompts or workflows to make your work faster.

Company Benefits

• 30 days holiday paid leave
• Competitive compensation package
• Exchange policy to another Payhawk office (London, Berlin, Barcelona, Paris, Amsterdam and Vilnius)
• Flexible working hours and opportunity to work from home
• Regular team-wide events
• Additional Medical care
• Company office massages
• Opportunity to use the Payhawk product with monthly commuting allowance

Payhawk is an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender perception or identity, national origin, age, marital status, protected veteran status, or disability status.