Lead Customer Onboarding

To lead and scale Mukuru's end-to-end customer onboarding and identity operations, ensuring that customers are onboarded, verified and maintained through a digital-first, risk-based approach that meets AML/CFT obligations across multiple jurisdictions, protects the business from financial crime and fraud, and delivers a fast, low-friction customer experience that supports growth.

To lead and scale Mukuru's end-to-end customer onboarding and identity operations, ensuring that customers are onboarded, verified and maintained through a digital-first, risk-based approach that meets AML/CFT obligations across multiple jurisdictions, protects the business from financial crime and fraud, and delivers a fast, low-friction customer experience that supports growth.

Mukuru is a fintech and digital financial services provider that has grown from a cross-border remittance business into a broader neobanking and digital payments platform serving customers across multiple African markets and the UK. As the product range expands into accounts, wallets, cards and payments, customer onboarding has become both a critical financial crime control and a key driver of customer acquisition, conversion and trust.

The Lead:
Customer Onboarding reports to the Head of Customer Operations and sits alongside the other Lead roles in Customer Operations. The role brings together Compliance Ops (sanctions, PEP and watchlist screening and due diligence), Number Change (account recovery and changes to customer credentials) and Verifications (identity and document verification) under a single accountable owner. The Team Leaders of these three teams report directly into this role.

The successful candidate will bring proven expertise from banking, fintech, payments or remittances in KYC/CDD operations, digital identity verification and financial crime controls y will be expected to modernise the onboarding operating model: increasing automation and straight-through processing, embedding a risk-based approach, strengthening fraud and account takeover controls, managing technology vendors, and using data to balance regulatory compliance, cost and customer experience.

Internal liaison takes place with the Head of Customer Operations, peer Leads, Compliance and the MLRO, Financial Crime and Forensics, Fraud Risk, Product, Engineering and Data, Risk and Internal Audit, Sales and Distribution, and People (HR). External liaison takes place with identity verification, screening and data vendors, external auditors, customers on escalated matters and, through Compliance, regulators.

• Define and deliver the strategy and target operating model for onboarding, verification and account maintenance across all markets and products (remittance, wallets, accounts and cards)
• Build scalable, digital-first onboarding processes that support Mukuru's growth into neobanking and new markets
• Translate regulatory requirements and the company's risk appetite into clear, risk-based operating procedures, in partnership with Compliance
• Integrate Compliance Ops, Number Change and Verifications into one function with clear accountability, service levels and controls

• Ensure KYC, CDD and EDD are performed in line with a risk-based approach, FATF standards and the AML/CFT laws of each jurisdiction (e.g. the FIC Act in South Africa and the UK Money Laundering Regulations)
• Oversee identity and document verification across digital channels (eKYC, document authentication, biometrics, liveness and database checks) and assisted channels such as branches and agents
• Ensure customer risk rating, source of funds and income verification, and periodic KYC refresh are carried out accurately
• Own the quality assurance framework, including sampling, accuracy scoring, root cause analysis and remediation

• Ensure screening alerts at onboarding and on an ongoing basis are dispositioned accurately and within service levels
• Ensure true matches and suspicious activity are escalated to Financial Crime / AML for investigation and regulatory reporting, with audit-ready documentation
• Work with Compliance and vendors to tune screening rules and reduce false positives without increasing risk exposure