Senior Legal Counsel, Regulatory

Monzo; London, Cardiff; Hybrid; GBP 100,000 - 115,000; Full time

Job summary

Join Monzo's innovative team as a Senior Legal Counsel, Regulatory, where you'll provide critical legal advice on financial crime matters. With a focus on collaboration across departments, this role offers unique growth opportunities in a dynamic banking environment. Passion for compliance and ability to operate at all levels is essential.

Benefits

Flexible working hours

Learning budget of £1,000 a year for professional development

Stock options

Visa sponsorship available

Qualifications

• Minimum 5 years of relevant post qualification experience in financial crime.
• Experience in Anti-Money Laundering, Sanctions, Anti-Bribery and Corruption.
• Genuine interest in financial crime regulatory matters.

Responsibilities

• Act as a trusted legal advisor on financial crime matters.
• Monitor and advise on global regulatory changes.
• Develop processes to increase efficiency of regulatory advice.

Skills

Financial crime regulatory law

Strategic thinking

Strong communication

Problem solving

Education

Qualified lawyer, post qualification experience

Job description

We’re on a mission to make money work for everyone.

We’re waving goodbye to the complicated and confusing ways of traditional banking.

With our hot coral cards and get-paid-early feature, combined with financial education on social media and our award winning customer service, we have a long history of creating magical moments for our customers!

We’re not about selling products - we want to solve problems and change lives through Monzo ️

We're looking for a Senior Legal Counsel, Regulatory to join our team at Monzo and help us build one of the best, most innovative banks in the world. This role will have day-to-day responsibility for advising on regulatory matters, with a predominant focus on financial crime. This role will report to Monzo’s Principal Legal Counsel - Regulatory and is part of the Group Centre Regulatory team in the Legal & Board Governance Collective at Monzo. We support Monzo Group and its operating entities globally.

In this role, you will work at all levels in the organisation and in close partnership with our Financial Crime, US, EU, and Risk & Compliance teams, as well as in collaboration with senior Legal team stakeholders as the business develops into a matrix organisation. You’ll lead on a wide range of financial crime legal matters with opportunities for growth in role as the business scales in the UK and internationally. There'll also be opportunities to get involved in operational resilience, artificial intelligence, competition, and other regulatory matters.

No two days are the same in Monzo’s Legal team. This is not your typical legal role; so we’re not looking for a typical person. We’re looking for someone with exceptional technical expertise but is willing to roll up their sleeves and get things done. If this sounds right up your street then get in touch, we’d love to hear from you.

• Acting as a trusted legal advisor to our Financial Crime Monzonauts in local teams.
• Monitoring and advising upon material global regulatory changes and providing guidelines to local teams.
• Supporting our Group Regulatory Affairs teams to liaise with key regulatory bodies and manage cross-border regulatory issues
• Managing global regulatory frameworks to ensure consistent application across entities.
• Providing crucial insights and leverage entity local expertise to feed into the consolidated group regulatory strategy.
• Developing and implementing processes and procedures to increase the efficiency and scalability of regulatory legal advice across the Monzo Group.
• Delivering training, sharing insights from your work, and helping educate others on financial crime.
• Managing relationships with our external legal counsel and ensuring we are optimising our legal spend on regulatory matters.
• You have experience advising on financial crime regulatory matters, with a minimum of around 5 years relevant post qualification experience (or equivalent).
• You have a genuine interest in financial crime regulatory matters; it’s not just your job but something you care about.
• You have an excellent technical grounding in all aspects of financial crime regulatory law (including Anti-Money Laundering, Sanctions, Anti-Bribery and Corruption, Proceeds of Crime and Counter Terrorist Financing matters), having spent time in private practice, and ideally time in house at a bank and/or other financial institution or regulator.
• You are passionate about working to advise the business to help keep Monzo safe and compliant with our legal and regulatory obligations.
• You are a strategic thinker, a strong communicator and a keen problem solver who can recommend solutions that balance business and risk perspectives.
• You are willing to jump in and handle a wide range of financial regulatory legal issues that may arise even outside your core areas of expertise in an enthusiastic, proactive, and resourceful manner, and can sensibly assess when best to engage external counsel in a cost-effective way.
• You are comfortable operating at all levels of the organisation up to the Executive and liaising with a variety of internal and external stakeholders.
• You enjoy horizon scanning, proactively assessing risks, and quickly identifying and independently implementing mitigating actions.
• You have a dynamic and entrepreneurial approach and are comfortable with the ambiguity of a fast-paced and rapidly-evolving environment.
• You have an open and curious mind, are passionate about the intersection of banking and technology and are excited to join us for the next stage of our journey at Monzo!
• You welcome diverse perspectives, think rigorously and critically and aren’t afraid to challenge assumptions.
• You’ve got additional experience in any of the following regulatory areas: operational resilience, artificial intelligence, competition, and interchange fee regulation.

Not ticking every box? That’s totally okay! Studies show that women and people of colour might hesitate to apply unless they meet every single requirement. At Monzo, we’re dedicated to creating an inclusive and welcoming team. If you’re passionate about this role and keen to learn and grow with us, we encourage you to apply - even if you don’t have everything that's listed just yet. Drop us your application, we’d love to hear from you! In-house financial services experience (including at a regulator) is preferred, but is not essential for the right candidate. PQE is a guide only.

The application journey has 3 key steps

• Recruiter call (potentially followed by an initial call with Principal Legal Counsel - Regulatory)
• First stage 1 hour role specific interview (including chatting through a case study)
• Second stage 1 hour behavioural interview

Our average process takes around 3-4 weeks but we will always work around your availability. You will have the chance to speak to our recruitment team at various points during your process but if you do have any specific questions ahead of this please contact us on [e-mail].

We’ll only close this role once we have enough applications for the next stage. Please submit your application as soon as possible to make sure you don’t miss out.

Your compensation package:

c. £100,000 base salary (dependent on experience) stock options

We can sponsor visas

This role can be based in our London office, but we're open to distributed working within the UK (with ad hoc meetings in London).

We offer flexible working hours and trust you to work enough hours to do your job well, at times that suit you and your team

Learning budget of £1,000 a year for books, training courses and conferences

Equal opportunities for everyone

Diversity and inclusion are a priority for us and we’re making sure we have lots of support for all of our people to grow at Monzo. At Monzo, we’re embracing diversity by fostering an inclusive environment for all people to do the best work of their lives with us. This is integral to our mission of making money work for everyone. You can read more in our blog , 2024 Diversity and Inclusion Report and 2024 Gender Pay Gap Report.

We’re an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to age, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, family or parental status, national origin, or veteran, neurodiversity or disability status.

If you have a preferred name, please use it to apply. We don't need full or birth names at application stage

Apply for this job

*

indicates a required field

First Name *

Last Name *

Email *

Phone *

Resume/CV *

Enter manually

Accepted file types: pdf, doc, docx, txt, rtf

Enter manually

Accepted file types: pdf, doc, docx, txt, rtf

Select...

A US Person is defined as someone who:

• was born in the United States (US)
• has at least 1 parent who was born in the US
• is a naturalised citizen of the US
• is a green card holder
• is a US tax resident

Keeping your data safe is really important to us. * Select...

Please confirm your UK Right to Work status. * Select...

We legally have to verify your Right to Work in the UK before you can start working for us. We're asking for this information now so we know later what type of right to work check we need to do. Your answer to this question won't affect the outcome of your application, unless you'd need visa sponsorship but are applying to a role we can't sponsor.

If you’d like to, please share your preferred pronouns (eg. they/them/theirs, she/her/hers).

If you'd like to, please spell out your name how it's pronounced so we know how to say it.

Identity survey

Our goal at Monzo is to make money work for everyone. To do that, working at Monzo must work for everyone. We want to create an equitable, engaged and innovative workplace which gives people from all backgrounds the support they need to thrive and grow.

Making Monzo work for everyone starts right at the beginning of every Monzonaut's journey: when they apply to work here. This demographic survey will help us better understand the people who apply to work at Monzo. It'll help us see how different groups progress through our hiring process, and where we need to make improvements to be more inclusive. If you choose to fill it out, all of the information you give us is:

• Voluntary . And we've included a "prefer not to say" option for every question. It'd be helpful if you still fill out the survey even if you choose "prefer not to say" for every question, as it's useful for us to understand & record this. We won't know if you choose to fill this survey in or not.
• Anonymous to Monzo . We can't tie your responses to you and they won't make a difference to the outcome of your application. We'll only use grouped responses for equal opportunities monitoring in our hiring process.

By filling out this survey, you agree that we can use your responses for the purposes we've mentioned above. You are not letting us know if we need to make any adjustments to the hiring process because of disability or neurodiversity - to do this please email us.

How would you describe your gender identity? Select...

Do you identify as transgender? Select...

What's your sexual orientation? Select...

Do you identify as having a disability? Select...

Do you consider yourself to be neurodivergent? Select...