Interim Director, Financial Crime Transformation — Bank Remediation

The mandate

An internal investigation found that alert closures were being accelerated without consistent rationale, and the transformation director was suspended pending review. The bank now has a regulator-committed plan but no unconflicted leader connecting model tuning, case operations, customer risk and closure assurance.

The interim is expected within three weeks for a non-extendable nine-month term. Recruitment for a permanent director begins after the first independent quality sample, and a four-week overlap will transfer the remediated controls without disturbing the investigation.

Handover occurs when the alert backlog is within risk-based age limits, tuning changes have passed validation, high-risk customer files meet the refreshed evidence standard, and internal audit accepts every committed action. The incoming director must be able to reproduce closure evidence without relying on the interim's personal files.

The interim may reset investigation queues, reject deficient case closures, approve temporary staffing and allocate the ₹8 crore change budget. Changes to customer exit policy, filing thresholds, model risk appetite or permanent grade structure require the Chief Compliance Officer and relevant committee; no authority extends to disciplinary findings.

Fraud-loss recovery, cyber incident response and wholesale redesign of the transaction-monitoring platform are excluded. Legal will retain suspicious-transaction filing governance, while Human Resources owns the employee investigation.

Why this seat is open

The suspended leader cannot credibly direct controls that are part of the investigation. Existing operations managers also carry ownership of the questioned closure practices. The bank needs an external interim to separate evidence from assertion and finish the supervisory commitment on a fixed clock.

What you will own

• Re-segment the alert inventory by financial-crime exposure, customer harm, ageing and investigative dependency.
• Issue a case-evidence standard and refuse closure where source-of-funds, ownership or disposition logic is untraceable.
• Approve monitoring-rule tuning only after independent validation quantifies missed-risk and operational-capacity effects.
• Establish a quality sample that is statistically defensible, blinded to the original investigator and reported directly to Compliance.
• Decide temporary investigator deployment across sanctions, correspondent banking and high-risk customer cohorts.
• Assemble action-by-action supervisory closure packs linking design, operation, sample results, residual risk and accountable approval.
• Transfer the validated rule inventory, backlog trajectory, quality findings, vendor obligations and unresolved typology risks to the permanent director.

Candidate qualifications

• Led enterprise AML, sanctions or financial-crime transformation in a regulated bank at director or chief compliance officer minus-one level.
• Closed time-bound regulatory remediation involving alert backlogs, customer-risk files and independent testing.
• Understands transaction-monitoring model governance, tuning trade-offs and defensible quality sampling.
• Has challenged senior case owners and rejected weak closures despite throughput or customer pressure.
• Directed large onshore and outsourced investigation teams with control over deployment and remediation spend.
• Can navigate Indian AML obligations, correspondent-banking risk and committee evidence expectations.

Non-negotiables

• Can start in Hyderabad within three weeks and travel monthly to Mumbai.
• No involvement in the current platform vendor, investigation firm or affected outsourcing provider.
• Will maintain confidentiality walls around the employee investigation.
• Must have owned regulatory closure evidence, not merely supplied subject-matter advice.

1. 49 words maximum. Give your earliest start date and identify any bank or vendor conflict requiring disclosure.
2. 49 words maximum. Which financial-crime closure pack have you defended to a regulator or internal audit, and what evidence mattered most?
3. 49 words maximum. How did you reduce an alert backlog without weakening investigative quality?