Onboarding Risk Management

About Column

For companies building financial technology and transforming the financial services space, the biggest bottleneck to their growth and innovation is often the underlying banks and infrastructure stack they rely on. We have spent our careers founding and scaling companies like Plaid, Square, SoFi, Blend, and Affirm, and have seen this problem firsthand — builders and developers needing to partner with traditional banks, and creating API and abstraction layers over the patchwork that is the bank, its core, and many other vendors. All of this results in a complex (and often expensive) banking supply chain involving a user, fintech, BaaS middleware provider, bank, core and the Federal Reserve.

At Column, we set out to simplify and fix this. We are a bank and a software company built from the ground up, offering builders and developers technology-forward banking solutions that cut out the hundreds of vendors, middleware providers, and abstraction layers. This means a safer, more transparent, and less costly banking supply chain. Come build with us!

The opportunity:

The Onboarding Risk Management role is instrumental in ensuring Column’s onboarding function is meeting and exceeding the Bank’s regulatory and BSA/AML standards with every new customer. Column’s customer base is global and varied - as such, this individual will have ample opportunity to grow, learn, and take on new challenges. We are looking for someone who is extremely detail-oriented, passionate about high-quality work product, thrives in a fast-paced environment, can grasp complex customer types and payment flows and document them clearly and accurately, and has a passion for writing. If you have an in-depth understanding of regulatory expectations, KYC requirements, and payments, and you are excited at the prospect of documenting an extensive and complex onboarding process in a thorough, thoughtful, and strategic way, this job is for you.

While an in-person presence in the Bank’s Presidio-based office is preferred, this role is open to remote applicants with the expectation of periodic travel.

What you'll do:

• Onboarding Reviews: Provide the final review for all prospective high-risk customers.  This review will include highly tactical tasks, such as validating compliance with procedural requirements, alongside highly strategic tasks, such as testing potential regulatory challenge and poking holes in the team’s analysis.

• Editing: Make all edits/rewrites necessary to ensure the final analysis/review memo is accurate, complete, clear, descriptive, and answers all relevant questions about the risk presented by an individual customer.

• Provide Strategic Regulatory Advice: Play devil's advocate, put yourself in the shoes of a state or national regulator, and challenge the team’s analysis.

• Strategy and Planning: Develop and execute a risk-based oversight plan, ensuring that it covers all critical aspects of KYC, including CIP, customer due diligence, and EDD.

• Collaboration: Work closely with members of the BSA/AML, Compliance and Growth teams to ensure all customers have accurate, complete, and up-to-date customer files. This means identifying discrepancies, being proactive in proposing solutions, and driving files to completion.

• Training and Development: Provide training to team members based on themes that emerge from control reviews.

• Continuous Improvement: Identify opportunities for process enhancements and efficiency improvements within Bank’s KYC and onboarding processes.

What you'll need to be successful:

• Bachelor's degree in finance, business, or a related field

• Professional certification (e.g. CAMS) or graduate degree (e.g. law) preferred

• 7+ years of relevant experience in financial services, with a preference for experience in some combination of BSA/AML, payment operations, compliance, money transmission, product counsel, business operations, or onboarding

• Exceptional writing skills

• Bank regulatory exposure; while you don’t need to have worked directly for or with a banking regulator, you must understand regulators / the regulatory environment

• Familiarity with fintech/banking partnerships preferred

• Attention to detail and a commitment to accuracy

• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills

• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills

What you'll get from us:

• 🏥 Comprehensive health, dental, and vision plans, including options that are 100% covered by Column for you and 50% covered for your dependents<