Payment Screening Manager

The Payment Screening Manager leads MarTrust payment screening team within Compliance and owns the day-to-day running of sanctions, PEP and location screening on payments across the Group's regulated business units. The Manager runs the payment screening queue against agreed service levels, makes final decisions on escalated alerts and held payments, and reviews the quality of decisions made by Analysts. They own the payment screening procedures, rules and list configuration, work with Product, Operations and other teams to keep screening controls effective without slowing legitimate payments, and act as the main point of contact for banking partners on screening matters. Where sanctions evasion, money laundering or terrorist financing is known or suspected, they make sure it is reported to the MLRO promptly and handled in line with MarTrust policy.

Responsibilities:

• Lead, coach and develop the payment screening team, setting priorities, allocating work and ensure to track productivity and capacity utilization, and managing performance so that alerts and held payments are cleared accurately and within agreed service levels across all time zones.
• Make final decisions on escalated payment screening alerts, reviewing payer, beneficiary, bank, vessel, cargo and free-text details, and approve the release, rejection or onward escalation of held payments.
• Own the payment screening procedures, alert-handling standards and decision rationale guidance, keeping them aligned with MarTrust policy and with UK, EU, US (OFAC) and UN sanctions requirements.
• Run a quality assurance programme over Analyst decisions, tracking error rates and themes, and feed the results into targeted training and procedure updates.
• Manage the tuning of screening rules, fuzzy-matching thresholds, manage risk review and risk acceptance process by balancing effectiveness implementation of whitelist, graylist and blacklist entities.
• Escalate possible true matches and suspicious activity to the MLRO without delay, and lead the operational response where a match is confirmed, including freezing of funds and preparation of reports to the relevant sanctions authority.
• Act as the main point of contact for banking partners, auditors and regulators on payment screening, owning responses to requests for information and providing evidence for audits, reviews and regulatory examinations.
• Produce regular management information on alert volumes, productivity trend, capacity utilization, backlog, service levels, quality results and risk trends, and raise control gaps, emerging sanctions risks and resourcing needs with the Head of Screening.