Head of KYC

About

Swan is Europe’s embedded banking specialist. We empower software companies to embed banking features like accounts, cards, and payments directly into their products, under their own brand.Swan processes over €1.5 billion in monthly transactions for more than 150 companies—like Pennylane, Indy, Agicap, Libeo, and Lucca. Founded in 2019, the company has received growth capital from leading investors such as Lakestar, Accel, Creandum, Bpifrance and Eight Roads. Swan is a principal member of Mastercard and a licensed financial institution, regulated by the French banking authority (ACPR).

Our mission

Banking belongs in business software

Many software companies already serve small businesses incredibly well: helping them send invoices, run payroll, manage inventory, and more. They’re on a mission to become the central hub for managing every aspect of business life.

But when it comes to financial workflows, there’s still a gap. Too many critical tasks like managing cash flow, tracking payments, or reconciling accounts happen outside the software, across spreadsheets, email threads, banking portals.

It’s a missed opportunity. Business software shouldn’t just record financial activity — it should run it.

To learn more about us: About Swan ; Our story.

Job description

As the Head of KYC/KYB, you will be a key leader responsible for refining, implementing, and overseeing our entire KYC/KYB program. Reporting to our Chief Operating Officer (COO) (and eventually to VP of AML), you will work closely with the Head of Transaction Monitoring (in the Ops department) and our Head of Financial Crime (in the Risk department). This is a strategic and operational role, with a strong focus on operational excellence, scalability, and repeatable processes. You will be the architect of our future-proof KYC/KYB strategy, responsible for taking our existing processes and building them into a robust, scalable, and automated system that not only meets regulatory standards but also enhances the customer experience. You will manage a large team and a growing outsourced operation, and your success will be measured by your ability to improve our operational efficiency, reduce fraud, and deliver predictable outcomes as we scale.

KPIs: P90 SLA by country, 98% KYC appropriately refused, % KOs

Key Responsibilities

1. Strategic Leadership & Operational Excellence

• Refine and Execute Strategy: Take our existing KYC/KYB processes and refine them into a cohesive strategy for the company, ensuring alignment with business goals, regulatory obligations, and industry best practices.
• Scale and Optimize: Transform our current KYC/KYB operations to be highly efficient, scalable, predictable, and repeatable. Your focus will be on standardizing processes to consistently meet Service Level Agreements (SLAs) while we scale.
• Internationalization: Adapt and improve existing KYC/KYB processes to be compliant across different European jurisdictions, directly enabling our international expansion goals.
• Process Improvement & Fraud Reduction: Continuously analyze and improve existing processes to reduce fraud and minimize false positives. Collaborate with the Head of Financial Crime to use data to identify fraud patterns and proactively adjust our controls.
• Risk Frameworks: Challenge our existing risk frameworks and contribute to improving our customer scoring engine.
• Policy and Process Ownership: Own the development, implementation, and maintenance of all KYC/KYB policies, procedures, and controls in partnership with Risk team and internal contour.

2. Team Management & Development

• Lead and develop a team of KYC specialists, guiding them through a transition towards a more skilled, analysis-focused team. You will drive this transformation by leveraging AI and our outsourcing partners to handle routine tasks, allowing your in-house team to focus on complex cases, strategic analysis, and process improvement.
• Oversee Daily Operations: Take responsibility for daily operations, track and improve KPIs, and manage team workflows and resource allocation.
• Training & Coaching: Jointly with your management team, onboard and train new team members on KYC procedures and best practices. Provide continuous coaching and development support to the entire team.
• Quality & Performance: Ensure operational excellence through regular quality reviews and performance monitoring.
• Build and own the outsourcing strategy: Overseeing our provider to ensure they meet quality and efficiency standards while expanding our outsourcing strategy to cover new languages.

3. Technology & Innovation

• Technology Partnership: Partner closely with our product teams to continuously improve our KYC/KYB (end customer) user experience and internal user experience to ensure higher quality results.
• AI Implementation: Champion and support the compliant implementation of AI and automation in our KYC workflows to improve efficiency and accuracy.
• Collaboration: Address significant challenges related to scaling and optimizing current KYC processes, workflows, and tools while collaborating with product, engineering, risk & compliance, and SAM departments.

Preferred experience

✨ You’re a great match if:

• You have significant experience as a Head of/Lead in the KYC/AML/Financial Security area. Experience in fintech, payment, banking, or within a start-up/scale-up or fast-paced work environment would be a plus.
• You possess strong leadership and team management skills.
• You have a strong understanding of the AML-CTF regulatory framework.
• You enjoy streamlining internal processes to improve outcomes and scalability.
• You’re data-driven, with strong analytical skills and attention to detail.
• You know how to prioritize in a fast-paced production environment and can manage urgent cases effectively.
• You’re proactive, hands-on, and love getting things done.
• You’re fluent in English
• Our ideal teammate: Empathetic. Skilled. Frank. We love to challenge each other, and we leave our egos at the door.

It’s okay if you don’t tick all the boxes — don’t let imposter syndrome prevent you from applying 🙌 

Swan is committed to providing a caring work environment for all employees, regardless of age, sex, disability, sexual orientation, race, religion, or belief.

When it comes to recruitment, we’re interested in your work experience, skills, and overall personality. Because diversity makes the workplace stronger and is necessary for Swan’s success, we are intensifying efforts to incorporate concrete actions to help us improve in this area.

About Swan

✨ Perks of being a Swanee:

• Holidays : 25 days + RTT 🏝️
• Meal Vouchers: We provide a Swile card to cover your meals on work days. 🥗
• Transport: Monthly mobility package for employees. In accordance with the company agreement for sustainable mobilities, you can now use your mobility package to pay for alternative commuting modes. 🚇
• Health insurance (mutuelle): Alan. This is Swan's health and welfare insurance. 🚑
• Sports: Thanks to our partnership with Classpass and Gymlib, you can enjoy advantageous discounts on subscriptions. They offer a wide range of sports activities as well as wellness activities. 🏋
• Hybrid remote policy: We offer the possibility of working from home for 2 days per week. 🏡
• Offsite: Once a year we gather to reconnect, deep-dive into big topics, and relax. 🤝
• This isn’t a perk, it should be the rule, but diversity and inclusion are important at Swan. We’re working hard to get better every day.

✨ Our values:

Swan’s core values guide our actions daily. Individually, they may seem obvious, but together, they form a unique culture.

Simplicity: Leonardo Da Vinci said: “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” If something's convoluted or confusing, we work extra hard to break it down. - Making complex things simple is what we do.

Long Term: We always play the long game, whether it's to support our partners in their growth journey, or make tangible commitments to climate action.

Excellence: We are a team of experts who consistently go all out to create pixel-perfect banking services and exceed our partners' expectations— whatever it takes.

Be Human: We believe in the power of kindness and the importance of acting with integrity. But embracing our humanity extends beyond interpersonal interactions, it means caring about greater issues that affect our planet.

You can find out more about our culture.

Recruitment process

• A 30-min video call with our Talent Acquisition Manager, to get to know you, understand your career expectations and answer your questions
• An interview with Olivia, our COO, to dive deeper into your experience and alignment with our mission.
• A business case presentation & peer interview 
• Final round of interviews with our Chief People Officer and a member of the Executive Committee.