Senior Risk Analyst - Issuance

About Highnote 

Founded in 2020 by a team of leaders from Braintree, PayPal, and Lending Club, Highnote is an embedded finance company that sets the standard in modern card platform management. As an all-in-one card issuer processor and program management platform, we provide digital-first organizations with the flexibility to seamlessly issue and process payment cards, embed virtual and physical card payments, and integrate ledger and wallet functionalities—empowering businesses to drive growth and profitability.

We’ve raised $145M+ and have grown our team to 125+ employees. Headquartered in San Francisco, we’ve managed to build one of the most advanced payments teams in the industry, with team members in 25+ US states. 

Operating through our core values of customer obsession, executional excellence, intentional inclusion, we’re helping businesses grow for the future by creating the payment products demanded by tomorrow, with the ability to solve for use cases that don’t exist yet.

We are fast-moving, hands-on, and strongly believe everyone deserves a seat at the table. We believe we’re unlocking incredible opportunities that can change the future of payments, as long as we have the right people to make it happen. 

The Opportunity: 

Highnote is looking for a Senior Risk Analyst to join our risk operations efforts. This is an opportunity to bring your prior experience and tool kit to an early stage company where you will work with support, compliance, and product leadership to help build our risk operations from the ground up. Ideal candidates will have similar experience in ambiguous environments fulfilling a variety of roles, along with a knowledge of USA PATRIOT Act, OFAC, BSA/Anti-Money Laundering principles, Know Your Business and Know Your Customer processes, fraud investigations, and regulatory requirements for bank, card, or similar industries.

What you’ll need to be wildly successful: 

• Focus on quality while maintaining high-quantity output. This role requires an individual who can tackle problems and queues efficiently, while still maintaining a high-level of accuracy needed for risk-related matters. A solid risk operations knowledge base in a fintech related field and to say “you learn quickly” is a gross understatement.
• Maintain a strong and healthy sense of curiosity. You have a desire to understand the root-cause to any problem, evaluate explanations provided, and perform due diligence to validate your understanding. This spans across all aspects of your work, from reviewing new applications, to investigating leads, to participating in testing discussions with sponsor banks, and to verifying suspicious behavior understanding that the findings can have serious implications. 
• Empathy for customers and an ability to glean insights from customer communication and behaviors. You have an innate ability to feel the customer’s pain while balancing the risk and regulatory requirements to process payments. You can articulate the why behind the what with clarity and defend your position without disclosing confidential details. You can quickly identify genuine concerns and potentially suspicious behaviors from answers customers share. You act as a teacher helping others understand the risk requirements.
• Ability to assess the big picture with a refined detail-oriented approach. You are able to contribute risk requirements to enterprise-wide initiatives while not losing sight of the day-to-day needs and team operations.
• Advocate for the teams you work with and service. This role is heavily risk and compliance oriented. Risk and compliance can sometimes appear at odds with the goals of sales and marketing teams. You are able to demonstrate the value of your products and initiatives.
• Self-awareness is key.  You have a strong sense of self, know your strengths and where you have blindspots that you want to improve. You position yourself to make the most of your super powers and shore up your weaknesses.

What you’ll be doing:

• Perform Know Your Business and Know Your Customer reviews on new subscriber applications in accordance with Customer Identification Program to verify accuracy and intent in order to obtain an account.
• Verify application details and documents provided to ensure they meet criteria outlined in policies, are valid and legitimate.
• Assess ongoing risk and due diligence needs for newly onboarded customers abiding by enterprise policies.
• Analyze transaction data to identify fraud, credit, and compliance risks and perform risk mitigating actions where appropriate.  
• Investigate and complete comprehensive due diligence on accounts that flag in