VP-Operations

The Financial Crimes Operations Utility (the “Utility”) will be responsible for executing first line of defense financial crimes processes on behalf of American Express business units and Legal Entities. The Utility will centralize first line of defense financial crimes operations, beginning with KYC onboarding and refresh, and expanding over time to enhanced due diligence, screening, transaction monitoring and remittances, and first line investigations.
The Utility will be an integral part of the Global Servicing team, focused on improving regulatory resilience, strengthening quality and consistency, and creating the foundation for operational scalability.
The Vice President of Quality Control will be responsible for standing up and leading the end-to-end Quality Control (QC) function across the Utility, establishing consistent quality standards, governance, and data-driven insights across processes and geographies. This leader will play a critical role in stabilizing early operations, identifying systemic risk, and building the infrastructure needed to support regulatory resilience and scalable growth. The successful candidate will be a hands-on, data-led leader who can create structure in ambiguity, translate QC findings into sustainable process improvements, and build credibility with stakeholders across operations, risk, compliance, product, and technology.
Extensive experience leading QC, quality assurance, or operational risk functions in a financial crimes or operations environment.
Track record of building or transforming QC functions across complex, global operations.
Deep knowledge of financial crimes processes, regulatory expectations, and first-line control responsibilities.
Proven ability to use data, root cause analysis, and operational insights to drive measurable improvement.
Exceptional relationship building skills with senior stakeholders across operations, risk, compliance, product, learning, and technology.
Ability to lead through ambiguity, influence stakeholders and establish a disciplined operating culture in a new and evolving organization.
Employment eligibility to work with American Express in the UK is required as the company will not pursue visa sponsorship for these positions.
Define and implement QC governance, standards, sampling methodology, issue taxonomy, escalation procedures, and reporting across Utility processes and geographies.
Establish quality reporting and analytics that provides senior leaders clear visibility into defect trends, emerging risks, root causes, key risk indicators, and corrective action progress.
Identify systemic quality issues through root cause analysis and lead process redesign initiatives to mitigate operational, regulatory, and customer risks.
Partner with operations, risk, compliance, product, and technology teams to embed preventive controls and drive sustainable process improvements.
Oversee first-line QC reviews and control validation activities, ensuring findings are clearly documented, escalated, and aligned with enterprise policies and regulatory requirements.
Drive a culture of continuous improvement by leveraging automation, data analytics, and feedback loops with operations, learning, and risk to improve quality, efficiency, and customer outcomes.
Lead, develop, and inspire a geographically dispersed QC organization, fostering accountability, collaboration, strong judgment and disciplined execution.

Work arrangement
Hybrid