Senior Manager - KYC Operations

This is Adyen

Adyen provides payments, data, and financial products in a single solution for customers like Meta, Uber, H&M, and Microsoft - making us the financial technology platform of choice. At Adyen, everything we do is engineered for ambition. 

For our teams, we create an environment with opportunities for our people to succeed, backed by the culture and support to ensure they are enabled to truly own their careers. We are motivated individuals who tackle unique technical challenges at scale and solve them as a team. Together, we deliver innovative and ethical solutions that help businesses achieve their ambitions faster.

Senior Manager - KYC Operations

We are seeking an experienced and strategic Senior Manager – KYC Operations to lead our KYC onboarding and periodic review teams. This role plays a pivotal part in ensuring we onboard and maintain sub-customers (i.e. customers of our customers, such as platforms) efficiently, compliantly, and at scale.

You will oversee a team of Team Leads and their respective operational teams, driving performance against well-defined speed and quality metrics, while supporting our commercial teams in their growth objectives. This is a high-impact role requiring a combination of operational leadership, stakeholder management, and process excellence.

Key Responsibilities:

• Team Leadership & Management
• Lead, coach, and develop multiple KYC teams through a structured layer of Team Leads.
• Set clear team goals, KPIs, and performance metrics aligned to business objectives.
• Foster a culture of accountability, continuous learning, and customer-centric service delivery.
• KYC Operations & Delivery
• Ensure timely and high-quality onboarding and periodic reviews of sub-customers.
• Maintain robust operational oversight across all KYC work-streams to meet SLA and compliance obligations.
• Implement and refine workflows and quality assurance processes to maintain regulatory standards.
• Commercial Partnership
• Collaborate closely with commercial and growth teams to align KYC capacity with business demand.
• Translate commercial growth forecasts into actionable operational plans, including resourcing, training, and process scaling.
• Process Excellence & Scalability
• Identify and lead continuous improvement initiatives to drive efficiency, accuracy, and scalability in KYC operations.
• Partner with the relevant product teams to implement automation and workflow enhancements.
• Own and evolve metrics and reporting dashboards to enable real-time tracking of workload and team performance.
• Risk & Compliance
• Ensure all KYC activities are carried out in strict adherence to regulatory requirements and internal policies.
• Proactively manage operational risk through root-cause analysis, escalation frameworks, and corrective action plans.

Requirements:

• 5+ years of people leadership experience in KYC/AML operations.
• 2 years of experience leading leaders, including managing managers and overseeing multi-layered teams.
• Demonstrated experience managing team leads and large operational teams in a fast-paced, regulated environment.
• Proven ability to work cross-functionally, especially with commercial, product, and compliance stakeholders.
• Track record of process improvement and scaling operations through systems, automation, and change management.
• Excellent analytical, planning, and organizational skills.
• Strong communication and influencing skills at both operational and senior management levels.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience in fintech, payments, banking-as-a-service, or platform-based models.
• Exposure to global regulatory environments (e.g., UK, EU, US).
• Familiarity with KYC tools, case management systems, and analytics platforms.

Compensation

We offer a competitive compensation package that includes both a base salary and equity in the form of RSUs. Base salary ranges are location-dependent:

The annual base salary range for this role is $160,000 to $200,00 plus RSU's; to learn more about our compensation philosophy, please click here.

This role is based out of our Chicago office. We are an office-first company and value in-person collaboration; we do not offer remote-only roles.

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