Senior KYC Consultan

We're Hiring: Senior KYC Consultant

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 financial-crime controls, regulatory compliance, customer due diligence, and risk-management standards across diverse markets.

Our teams collaborate across Compliance, Financial Crime, Risk, Legal, Operations, Client Onboarding, Relationship Management, Technology, and business functions to establish effective Know Your Customer (KYC) frameworks and support compliant customer relationships.

The Role

We are seeking an experienced Senior KYC Consultant to provide specialist expertise across customer due diligence, KYC remediation, client onboarding, enhanced due diligence, risk assessment, and regulatory compliance.

The ideal candidate will combine strong KYC knowledge, investigative judgment, analytical capability, and stakeholder-management skills to assess complex customer profiles, identify financial-crime risks, strengthen onboarding and remediation processes, and provide practical recommendations that support regulatory compliance and business objectives.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and support complex KYC and customer due-diligence engagements across multiple customer types, jurisdictions, and business lines.
• Review customer onboarding and periodic-review processes to assess compliance with applicable KYC requirements.
• Perform detailed Customer Due Diligence (CDD) and Enhanced Due Diligence (EDD) reviews.
• Assess customer identity, ownership structures, business activities, source of funds, source of wealth, expected account activity, and geographic exposure.
• Review complex corporate, institutional, private-client, trust, partnership, foundation, and investment structures.
• Identify and verify Ultimate Beneficial Owners (UBOs), controllers, directors, shareholders, authorized representatives, and related parties.
• Analyze ownership and control structures involving multiple entities and jurisdictions.
• Conduct adverse-media screening and assess potentially relevant negative information.
• Review sanctions, politically exposed person (PEP), regulatory, law-enforcement, and other relevant screening results.
• Investigate potential name matches and determine whether alerts represent true matches, false positives, or cases requiring escalation.
• Assess customer risk using applicable KYC and financial-crime risk methodologies.
• Evaluate geographic, industry, product, customer, transaction, ownership, and reputational risk factors.
• Recommend appropriate customer-risk classifications and risk-rating adjustments.
• Identify situations requiring enhanced due diligence, senior approval, additional documentation, or escalation.
• Review source-of-wealth and source-of-funds evidence for completeness, credibility, and consistency.
• Challenge incomplete, inconsistent, outdated, or insufficient customer information.
• Conduct independent research using reliable public and commercial information sources.
• Analyze corporate registries, regulatory filings, ownership records, financial information, websites, media sources, and other relevant documentation.
• Assess complex customer relationships involving high-risk jurisdictions, industries, products, structures, or customer types.
• Review existing KYC files as part of remediation, periodic review, trigger-event review, or quality-assurance programs.
• Lead large-scale KYC remediation and customer-file refresh initiatives.
• Identify documentation gaps, data-quality issues, outdated information, and control weaknesses.
• Develop remediation strategies and prioritize customer files according to risk.
• Coordinate with Client Onboarding, Operations, Compliance, Relationship Management, and business teams to obtain outstanding information.
• Provide guidance on appropriate documentation and evidence required to satisfy KYC requirements.
• Review KYC files for completeness, consistency, accuracy, and regulatory sufficiency.
• Perform quality assurance reviews and provide detailed feedback on KYC analysts' work.
• Identify recurring errors, process weaknesses, and training requirements.
• Develop practical recommendations to strengthen KYC processes, controls, and documentation standards.
• Support development and enhancement of KYC policies, procedures, standards, and operating models.
• Interpret regulatory requirements and translate them into practical KYC procedures and control requirements.
• Monitor changes in applicable AML, CDD, KYC, sanctions, and financial-crime regulations.
• Support implementation of regulatory and policy changes across onboarding and KYC processes.
• Provide technical guidance on complex KYC cases and challenging customer structures.
• Advise stakeholders on appropriate due-diligence approaches, escalation requirements, and risk-mitigation measures.
• Support decisions regarding customer acceptance, retention, restriction, remediation, or exit where appropriate.
• Coordinate with Compliance and Financial Crime teams on cases requiring escalation or further investigation.
• Identify potential indicators of money laundering, terrorist financing, fraud, sanctions evasion, corruption, or other financial-crime risks.
• Escalate material concerns through established financial-crime and compliance channels.
• Maintain clear documentation of investigations, analysis, decisions, evidence, and rationale.
• Ensure KYC records are maintained accurately and securely in approved systems.
• Support internal audits, regulatory examinations, compliance testing, and independent reviews.
• Prepare management reports covering KYC volumes, remediation status, risk trends, quality findings, and outstanding issues.
• Develop KYC dashboards and performance metrics to support management oversight.
• Monitor onboarding and periodic-review turnaround times and service-level performance.
• Identify opportunities to improve KYC processes through workflow optimization, automation, data quality, and technology.
• Support KYC technology implementations, screening-system enhancements, workflow improvements, and data-migration initiatives.
• Evaluate the effectiveness of KYC controls and recommend improvements based on emerging risks and operational experience.
• Deliver KYC training and knowledge-sharing sessions to analysts, operations teams, and relevant stakeholders.
• Mentor junior KYC professionals and provide technical guidance on complex cases.
• Promote consistent application of KYC standards across teams, jurisdictions, and business units.
• Maintain strict confidentiality when handling sensitive customer, financial, ownership, and personal information.
• Support senior management with insights into KYC risk exposure, regulatory developments, customer-risk trends, and control effectiveness.

Key Performance Indicators

• KYC review completion rate
• Customer onboarding turnaround time
• Periodic-review completion rate
• KYC remediation completion rate
• High-risk customer review completion
• Enhanced due-diligence completion rate
• Customer-risk rating accuracy
• UBO identification accuracy
• Source-of-wealth verification quality
• Source-of-funds verification quality
• KYC file completeness
• KYC documentation accuracy
• Screening alert resolution time
• False-positive resolution rate
• Adverse-media review quality
• PEP identification accuracy
• Sanctions-screening escalation accuracy
• KYC quality-assurance pass rate
• KYC error rate
• KYC rework rate
• Documentation-deficiency rate
• Customer-risk escalation rate
• High-risk case escalation timeliness
• Remediation backlog
• Overdue KYC review rate
• Service-level compliance
• KYC investigation turnaround time
• Regulatory compliance rate
• Audit finding rate
• KYC control effectiveness
• Repeat KYC findings
• Data-quality improvement
• KYC policy compliance
• KYC process efficiency
• Automation adoption
• KYC system-data accuracy
• Management-reporting timeliness
• KYC training completion
• Analyst competency improvement
• Stakeholder satisfaction
• Regulatory issue resolution
• KYC risk reduction
• Continuous-improvement implementation

Ideal Candidate

The successful candidate should have strong experience in KYC, Customer Due Diligence, Enhanced Due Diligence, AML, client onboarding, financial crime compliance, or regulatory consulting, preferably within banking, financial services, fintech, payments, investment management, professional services, or another regulated environment.

The candidate should demonstrate:

• Strong understanding of KYC, CDD, EDD, AML, sanctions, and financial-crime risk-management principles.
• Proven experience conducting complex customer due-diligence reviews.
• Strong knowledge of corporate ownership, control structures, and UBO identification.
• Experience reviewing complex legal entities, investment structures, trusts, partnerships, and international organizations.
• Strong investigative and analytical research capabilities.
• Experience conducting adverse-media, PEP, sanctions, and regulatory screening assessments.
• Strong understanding of source-of-funds and source-of-wealth analysis.
• Experience assessing high-risk customers, jurisdictions, industries, products, and business relationships.
• Strong knowledge of risk-based KYC methodologies and customer-risk classification.
• Experience managing KYC remediation and periodic-review programs.
• Strong ability to identify inconsistencies, missing information, unusual structures, and potential financial-crime indicators.
• Excellent attention to detail and documentation discipline.
• Strong understanding of applicable AML/KYC regulatory requirements and industry standards.
• Experience working with compliance, financial-crime, legal, operations, onboarding, and relationship-management teams.
• Strong report-writing and case-documentation skills.