Compliance Officer

The Role

Every payment licence PawaPay holds across our African markets depends on one thing happening properly, every day: merchants being onboarded, monitored and screened correctly. As we expand into new markets and bring on more merchants, the volume of KYC reviews, monitoring alerts and screening checks is outpacing what can be handled ad hoc — this role exists to give that operational compliance workload a dedicated, hands-on owner.

At its core, you own the execution: merchant due diligence, transaction monitoring investigations and screening for your portfolio, turning policy into real decisions on real cases, day in and day out.

You'll join the Compliance Operations team and work alongside other Compliance Officer. It's also not a policy-setting or Head of Compliance role: you execute against frameworks that already exist rather than write them, and licence strategy sits above this role, not inside it.

You'll inherit onboarding workflows, transaction monitoring tooling and screening systems that are already up and running — you're not building compliance infrastructure from the ground up. What's expected of you is the judgement to run those processes rigorously on live cases, and the initiative to flag where they're falling short.

What you are accountable for:

You are accountable for protecting PawaPay's payment licences by ensuring every merchant in your portfolio is onboarded, monitored and screened in line with regulatory requirements and internal policy.

When speed and risk conflict, risk wins — but your job is to resolve that tension fast enough that legitimate merchants barely feel it. That balance, not either extreme, is the standard you're held to.

You are not accountable for setting compliance policy, defining risk appetite, or licence strategy — that sits with Compliance leadership; your role is disciplined execution against the frameworks they set.

 What you own day to day

• Merchant onboarding & KYC. Review and verify merchant KYC documentation, assess risk based on business model, jurisdiction and transaction volume, and hold calls with clients to clarify ownership structures and operations before approving onboarding.
• Transaction monitoring. Investigate alerts generated by PawaPay's monitoring tools, assess for fraudulent or suspicious activity, and escalate cases of concern to the relevant teams for corrective action or reporting.
• Screening. Run PEP and sanctions screening on merchants and associated entities, and apply enhanced due diligence (EDD) to high-risk merchants and transactions.
• Ongoing monitoring. Review merchants' continued compliance with regulatory and internal requirements over the life of the relationship, acting where standards slip.
• Reporting & audit support. Prepare compliance reports and summaries for management and regulators, and support internal and external audits related to compliance.
• Process improvement. Spot gaps or weaknesses in onboarding, screening and monitoring workflows, and work with cross-functional teams to fix them.
• Regulatory awareness. Track regulatory change across African markets and translate it into practical adjustments to how the team works.

What you do not own

To keep the role sharp, it is as important to be clear on what sits outside it:

• Compliance policy and risk appetite — sits with Compliance leadership; you execute against the framework, you don't set it.
• Final sign-off on escalated or high-risk cases — sits with senior Compliance / MLRO sign-off [role to confirm]; you investigate and recommend, they decide.
• Managing a team — this is not a team-lead role. You own your own portfolio of merchants and cases; it is not the first hire of a growing analyst team, though that may change as the function scales.

How the role is measured

You will be measured on the quality and timeliness of your case decisions, not on volume alone — a fast wrong decision costs PawaPay more than a slightly slower right one. The primary measures are:

• KYC review turnaround. Time from documentation received to onboarding decision (target: within [X] business days).
• Alert investigation SLA. Time from a transaction monitoring alert firing to it being resolved or escalated (target: within [X] hours).
• Screening accuracy. Correct disposition of PEP/sanctions hits, verified through periodic QA review.
• Escalation quality. Proportion of your escalations that leadership agrees were warranted and well-evidenced.
• Audit findings. Number and severity of findings against your case files in internal or external audits (target: zero material findings).

These targets tighten as you build a track record — turnaround SLAs typically get faster once a new joiner is fully ramped. There is no single long-term north-star metric for this role beyond licences remaining in good standing; that gets reviewed at the team level, not the individual level. Success six months in looks like your teammates trusting your calls enough to stop double-checking them.

What we are looking for

• Experience. 3 years in KYC, transaction monitoring or a similar compliance role, ideally within a regulated, partner-dependent or scale-up environment.
• Operator, not administrator. You don't just process cases — you read the story behind a merchant's transaction pattern or ownership structure and know when something doesn't add up. Experience handling live investigations, not just training scenarios, is highly desirable.
• Language. Fluent English (written and verbal) is essential; fluent French is highly desirable.
• Tooling and AI. Comfortable working across ClickUp, Slack and Google Workspace, plus transaction monitoring and screening platforms. You use tools like Claude to speed up documentation review and pattern-spotting, not as a substitute for your own judgement on a case.
• Domain. Exposure to mobile money or African payment markets, and experience working with regulators (particularly in Africa), are a strong plus — desirable, not essential.
• Qualifications. Compliance certifications (e.g. ICA, CAMS) are a plus but rank behind a demonstrated track record of closing real cases correctly.
• Other. Strong organisational skills, technology-savvy and comfortable in a remote, autonomy-driven environment, and willing to travel as required.

Key competencies

• Attention to detail — spots the inconsistency in a KYC file that others would wave through.
• Analytical rigour — reads transaction patterns and ownership structures, not just checklists.
• Confident communication — pushes back on a merchant or a colleague when something doesn't stack up.
• Diligence and ownership — treats every case file as something their name is on.
• Autonomy — comfortable making judgement calls in a remote, low-supervision environment.
• Cross-team collaboration — works fluidly with onboarding, risk and engineering to fix process gaps.
• Adaptability — keeps pace as regulation and the business change around them.