Senior Enhanced Due Diligence Specialist

We're Hiring: Senior Enhanced Due Diligence Specialist

Location: United Arab Emirates (Remote)

Employment Type: Full-Time

Experience Level: Senior

Work Arrangement: Fully Remote

About Us

We are a globally focused organization committed to maintaining strong customer due diligence, financial-crime prevention, regulatory compliance, and risk-management standards across diverse markets.

Our teams collaborate across Compliance, Financial Crime, KYC, AML, Sanctions, Legal, Risk, Operations, Client Services, and Technology to assess higher-risk customers, investigate complex ownership and financial profiles, and ensure appropriate controls are applied throughout the customer lifecycle.

The Role

We are seeking an experienced Senior Enhanced Due Diligence Specialist to lead and support enhanced due diligence (EDD) reviews for high-risk and complex customers, entities, relationships, and transactions.

The ideal candidate will provide senior-level expertise in high-risk customer assessment, beneficial ownership analysis, source-of-wealth and source-of-funds verification, adverse-media research, PEP assessment, geographic and sector risk analysis, customer-risk rating, remediation, escalation, and regulatory documentation.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain enhanced due-diligence procedures, standards, methodologies, and review guidelines.
• Conduct comprehensive EDD reviews for high-risk customers and business relationships.
• Assess customers presenting elevated risks due to geography, industry, ownership, business activity, transaction patterns, or other risk factors.
• Review high-risk individual, corporate, institutional, investment, trust, partnership, and complex ownership structures.
• Conduct detailed customer-risk assessments using available internal and external information.
• Identify and assess beneficial owners, controlling persons, directors, shareholders, authorized representatives, and related parties.
• Trace ownership and control through multiple entities, jurisdictions, nominees, holding companies, trusts, and other structures.
• Evaluate the transparency and legitimacy of complex ownership arrangements.
• Conduct detailed source-of-wealth assessments for high-risk customers.
• Assess the origin, accumulation, and plausibility of customer wealth.
• Conduct source-of-funds reviews and determine whether funding sources are consistent with the customer's profile and expected activity.
• Review supporting financial, corporate, commercial, tax, legal, and other documentation to substantiate customer information.
• Conduct comprehensive adverse-media and open-source intelligence research.
• Investigate allegations involving fraud, corruption, bribery, money laundering, terrorist financing, tax crime, sanctions evasion, organized crime, regulatory violations, or other financial-crime risks.
• Assess the relevance, credibility, recency, and severity of adverse information.
• Conduct detailed PEP and close-associate assessments.
• Assess domestic and foreign PEP exposure and determine appropriate EDD requirements.
• Review relationships involving high-risk countries, jurisdictions, sectors, industries, products, services, or delivery channels.
• Assess country and geographic risk associated with customer residence, incorporation, operations, ownership, counterparties, and source of funds.
• Evaluate expected customer activity against available financial, commercial, and operational information.
• Identify inconsistencies between customer declarations, supporting documentation, ownership structures, and expected activity.
• Review transaction information where necessary to validate the customer's stated business model, wealth, funding sources, and risk profile.
• Coordinate with AML and Transaction Monitoring teams when EDD findings overlap with suspicious activity concerns.
• Support investigations involving unusual customer behavior, complex transactions, or potential financial-crime indicators.
• Determine appropriate risk ratings based on documented EDD findings and applicable methodology.
• Recommend customer risk-rating changes where material new information is identified.
• Provide clear rationale for high-risk classifications, risk acceptance, escalation, or relationship decisions.
• Escalate material EDD concerns to senior Compliance, MLRO, Financial Crime, Risk, Legal, or relevant governance committees.
• Support customer onboarding and approval processes for high-risk relationships.
• Conduct periodic EDD reviews based on customer risk, regulatory requirements, and internal review cycles.
• Conduct event-driven EDD reviews following material changes in ownership, management, geography, business activity, adverse media, transactions, or other risk factors.
• Support high-risk customer remediation and customer-file refresh programs.
• Identify missing, outdated, inconsistent, or insufficient EDD information and coordinate remediation.
• Maintain comprehensive EDD case files, research records, evidence, decision rationale, approvals, and escalation documentation.
• Ensure all EDD conclusions are supported by reliable evidence and appropriately documented.
• Conduct independent quality reviews of EDD files and high-risk customer assessments.
• Identify recurring EDD weaknesses, documentation gaps, inconsistent decisions, and process deficiencies.
• Develop corrective and preventive actions and track remediation through completion.
• Support internal audits, external audits, regulatory examinations, compliance testing, and financial-crime reviews.
• Prepare EDD documentation, case files, management information, and supporting evidence for auditors and regulators.
• Monitor EDD case queues, review aging, outstanding information requests, escalations, and remediation status.
• Develop management reports covering high-risk customers, EDD volumes, review status, risk themes, escalations, and remediation.
• Monitor emerging financial-crime typologies and assess their relevance to high-risk customer populations.
• Monitor regulatory developments and industry guidance relating to enhanced customer due diligence.
• Translate regulatory changes into practical EDD procedures, controls, review requirements, and training.
• Support risk assessments for new products, markets, customer segments, jurisdictions, and business relationships.
• Work closely with KYC teams to ensure EDD requirements are incorporated into onboarding and periodic-review processes.
• Coordinate with Sanctions, AML, Fraud, Legal, Risk, and Compliance teams on overlapping high-risk cases.
• Support the development of EDD risk indicators, review triggers, escalation criteria, and decision frameworks.
• Provide subject-matter guidance to KYC and compliance analysts handling complex customer cases.
• Review complex EDD cases prepared by junior team members and provide technical feedback.
• Mentor and coach EDD analysts to improve research quality, analytical judgment, documentation, and regulatory awareness.
• Support EDD training and awareness programs for Compliance, KYC, Client Services, and onboarding teams.
• Participate in KYC, AML, screening, customer-risk, and case-management system enhancements.
• Support user acceptance testing, workflow design, data migration, and implementation of EDD technology solutions.
• Identify opportunities to improve EDD efficiency through workflow automation, research tools, data integration, and standardized review methodologies.
• Maintain strict confidentiality when handling sensitive customer, financial, ownership, investigation, and compliance information.
• Promote a strong culture of risk-based due diligence, financial-crime prevention, regulatory compliance, and professional judgment.

Key Performance Indicators

• EDD review accuracy
• High-risk customer review completion
• EDD turnaround time
• EDD case aging
• EDD backlog
• High-risk onboarding completion
• Periodic EDD review completion
• Event-driven EDD completion
• EDD remediation completion rate
• Customer-risk assessment accuracy
• High-risk customer identification accuracy
• Beneficial ownership verification accuracy
• Ownership-structure analysis quality
• Source-of-wealth verification quality
• Source-of-funds verification quality
• PEP assessment accuracy
• Adverse-media research quality
• Geographic-risk assessment accuracy
• Industry and sector-risk assessment quality
• Customer activity plausibility assessment
• EDD documentation completeness
• EDD documentation accuracy
• EDD quality-assurance score
• EDD escalation accuracy
• High-risk case resolution time
• Complex-case investigation quality
• Risk-rating accuracy
• Risk-rating reassessment timeliness
• Customer remediation closure rate
• Outstanding information request aging
• EDD service-level compliance
• Audit finding resolution
• Regulatory examination readiness
• EDD control effectiveness
• Repeat EDD issue rate
• Data-quality improvement
• EDD management reporting timeliness
• Emerging-risk identification
• Analyst productivity
• Analyst quality performance
• Training completion
• EDD process improvement completion
• EDD automation effectiveness
• Financial-crime risk reduction

Ideal Candidate

The successful candidate should have strong experience in enhanced due diligence, KYC, AML, financial-crime compliance, customer-risk management, investigations, or regulatory compliance, preferably within banking, payments, fintech, investment services, private banking, wealth management, insurance, or another regulated financial environment.

The candidate should demonstrate:

• Strong knowledge of enhanced due-diligence principles and risk-based customer assessment.
• Proven experience conducting EDD reviews for high-risk and complex customers.
• Strong understanding of beneficial ownership, control structures, and complex corporate entities.
• Experience assessing source of wealth and source of funds.
• Strong adverse-media and open-source intelligence research capabilities.
• Experience assessing PEPs, close associates, high-risk jurisdictions, and elevated-risk industries.
• Strong knowledge of AML, KYC, CDD, and financial-crime risk frameworks.
• Experience analyzing complex customer profiles and ownership structures across multiple jurisdictions.