Chief Compliance Officer, Airbnb Payments UK

Job Description

Founded in 2008, Airbnb exists to create a world where anyone can belong anywhere, providing healthy travel that is local, authentic, diverse, inclusive and sustainable. Airbnb uniquely leverages technology to economically empower millions of people around the world to unlock and monetize their spaces, passions and talents to become hospitality entrepreneurs. Airbnb’s accommodation marketplace provides access to 6+ million unique places to stay in nearly 100,000 cities and 191 countries. With Experiences, Airbnb offers unprecedented access to local communities and interests through 30,000+ unique, handcrafted activities run by hosts across 1,000+ markets around the world. Airbnb’s people-to-people platform benefits all its stakeholders, including hosts, guests, employees and the communities in which it operates.

Chief Compliance Officer, Airbnb Payments UK

Job Description

At Airbnb the Payments Compliance Team maintains a global regulatory compliance program that supports 191 countries, 70 currencies, connects dozens of payment providers and banks, and processes multiple billions of dollars. The Compliance team is tasked with protecting the payments that run through our payments infrastructure by building controls into our products, investigating unusual activities, filing regulatory reports with relevant regulatory agencies (including the FCA in the UK) and carrying out economic sanctions screening. In this role you would oversee policy and ensure that day-to-day compliance operational activities are maintained to the department’s high internal standards, you will interact with our regulatory agencies and participate in regulatory examinations.

The Airbnb Compliance team is building a scalable Compliance foundation to support regulatory compliance on a global scale. The team helps the company grow by ensuring that the payments product can continue to grow in a safe and compliant fashion.

Who We’re Looking For

First and foremost, we’re looking for people who know and use Airbnb and believe in what we’re trying to accomplish. Airbnb is a marketplace that connects guests and hosts while providing the level of trust needed to enable each transaction. Payments Compliance is central to creating that trust, which is why Payments Compliance is a core and strategic part of Airbnb.

The Compliance Officer for Airbnb Payments UK, an e-money institution, will help us continue to build our compliance program for the UK markets and a significant amount of rest-of-world payments transactions. The Compliance Officer will be responsible for handling interactions with regulatory agencies and with relevant teams at financial institutions. Ensuring Airbnb Payments UKs adherence to relevant directives, i.e. PSD2 and 5MLD.

Reporting into the global Chief Compliance Officer in San Francisco and in collaboration with other global Compliance leadership, and global functional work streams you will define the strategy for Compliance, ensuring we’re able to protect and grow our community with best in class payments.

You’ll work with a dedicated team of product managers, engineers and data scientists to build best in class compliance technology and product infrastructure. Additionally, you will work with compliance operations, and legal to define the policies and procedures that make up the core of our compliance program, and ensure the safety of the payments that flow through Airbnb.

If this sounds like an interesting challenge to you, we’d love to meet!

Required Qualifications:

• 7+ years of compliance management experience in dynamic and fast-paced financial services environments. Preferably from an e-commerce, fintech, or retail finance compliance environment.
• Prior management responsibility for compliance operational activities in an e-money institution or payments institution.
• Prior experience leading compliance programs focused on AML, KYC, Sanctions and other relevant Compliance requirements.
• Demonstrated knowledge identifying anti-money laundering and economic sanctions typologies related to the payments and e-commerce space.
• Prior experience with UK regulatory requirements, ability to interact with regulatory agencies
• Working knowledge of relevant payments regulations including PSD2 and 5MLD essential.
• Extensive experience working cross-functionally, ideally globally, representing Compliance to ensure that all requirements are met in an innovation friendly fashion
• Understand the needs of our customers both internal and external, ability to grow a Compliance program by continuously building and iterating.
• Ability to build relationships, create partnerships and influence both inside and outside of the Compliance organization.
• Thrives in a startup environment: loves dealing with fast paced, and changing product requirements.
• An extremely high level of personal integrity and discipline
• Strong communication, critical thinking, analytical and problem solving skills
• Finalist candidates must go through an approval process with the FCA prior to commencing in this position. Employment is conditional to this approval.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Professional certification in compliance risk management
• Growth mindset: effectively balances the need to protect the community with the need to grow the community
• Global perspective: experience with global payment programs and global teams
• Program Development: experience working with product and operations teams, making smart investments in tools and workflow processes to scale up the team.
• Scale: knows how to start small but build big
• Ability to lead a team and motivate people to excel under pressure