Salary: National from £41,800 to £52,000 and London from £46,000 to £57,000

Are you interested in being part of a globally unique team?

OPBAS (Office for Professional Body Anti-Money Laundering) is seeking a colleague to join us to cover a 12 month vacancy on either a secondment or fixed term basis.

The team/department

OPBAS was formed in February 2018 as part of the UK’s response to the threat of money laundering. Previous UK National Risk Assessments identified the legal and accountancy sectors as being particularly vulnerable to facilitating organised crime due to the credibility and respectability those sectors convey. OPBAS’s objectives are to reduce the harm of money laundering (and terrorist financing) by ensuring a robust and consistently high standard of professional body AML/CTF (counter-terrorist financing) supervision, and to facilitate information and intelligence sharing between professional body supervisors (PBSs), statutory supervisors, and law enforcement agencies.

What you will be doing

• Spearhead and support relationships with PBSs including, with appropriate support, planning and running supervisory visits, analysing findings and making judgements about the effectiveness of their AML supervision
• Support other members of the team, including through participating in PBS visits and proactive engagement
• Clearly and credibly explain expectations to legal and accountancy supervisors
• Critically assess and evaluate information to form judgements about progress against AML and CTF standards
• Build and maintain good relationships with internal and external stakeholders
• The role will include opportunities to get involved with other areas of the department’s work where capacity permits, for example policy development
• Please note this role will be subject to achieving Security Check (SC) using the National Security Vetting system

What you will get from the role

• This is an opportunity to be part of a globally unique team driving up standards of AML supervision among supervisors of the legal and accountancy sectors in the UK
• The role will provide a unique opportunity to develop expertise in combating economic crime

Our competitive flexible benefits scheme gives you the opportunity to create a personalised benefits package, tailored to suit your lifecycle. You can use this allowance to purchase additional benefits such as dental or cycle to work or you have the option top up your base salary by taking this as cash. 

Core benefits that you will receive as standard are: 

• ​25 days holiday per year plus bank holidays
• Private healthcare with Bupa 
• A non-contributory Pension of at least 8% of basic salary each month (there are several contribution levels that increase depending on your age – up to 12% a month once you reach age 35). 
• Life assurance of eight times your basic salary 
• Income protection 

​We support hybrid working which means you will be able to work from home up to 60% of the time over a month with the remainder of your time in one of our three office locations. 

The skills and experience you will have  

Minimum

We are a signatory to the Government’s Disability Confident scheme. This means that we will offer an interview to disabled candidates entering under the scheme, who best meet the minimum criteria for a role.

• Experience of Stakeholder management in order to build and maintain professional working relationships internally and externally
• Experience in a supervisory or financial-crime related role, legal, accounting or insolvency background or experience of the sectors being regulated
• Experience of using analytical skills to make judgements and recommendations

Essential

• Good sense of judgement and personal accountability
• Ability to apply a risk-based approach to supervision and an understanding of key regulatory risks
• Good (oral and written) communication skills
• Ability to influence and question constructively and deal with challenge
• Ability to demonstrate tenacity and flexibility
• Ability to manage competing tasks and issues, prioritising appropriately and escalating where necessary
• Working collaboratively as part of a team, valuing different perspectives and backgrounds, and working with others collaboratively, minimising silos

About the FCA  

The FCA regulates the conduct of 50,000 firms in the UK to ensure our financial markets are honest, fair and competitive. We do this to make sure markets work well for individuals, businesses and the economy as a whole. For more information on what we do, our three-year strategy can be found here. 

The FCA's Values & Diversity

Our ambition is to cultivate a culture of inclusion for all employees that respects their individual strengths, views, and experiences. We believe that our differences and similarities enable us to be a better organisation – one that makes better decisions, drives innovation, and delivers better regulation. 

The FCA is committed to achieving greater diversity across all levels of the organisations. Given this, we particularly welcome applications from women, disabled and minority ethnic candidates for our Associate role.  

Flexible working

We welcome applications from candidates who are looking for flexible arrangements.  Many of our staff work flexibly including working part-time, staggered hours, and job shares.  We can’t promise to give you exactly what you want but we won’t judge you for asking.   
 

Multi-location 

As part of the FCA’s on-going commitment to develop our national presence, most of our vacancies are now open to working in our Edinburgh, Leeds, or London offices.  This means that as part of the application process you will be able to select your preference of which office location you would like to work from.  

Useful information 

• Applications for this role close at 23.59 on 23rd September 2024
• This role is graded as Associate level 8 - Regulatory 
• Interviews will take place from 11th November 2024

Got a question?   

If you are interested in learning more about the role please contact: 

For internal applicants, please contact Linda Bradley at [email protected] 

For external applicants please contact Chhavi Bartaria at [email protected] 

What to expect from our interview process 

If your application is successful you will be invited to complete a case study and one hour competency based interview.

Application support  

We want to remove any possible barriers and are committed to providing a wide range of reasonable adjustments so that you can keep the focus on your conversations and be at your best.  

If you have an accessibility requirement, disability, or condition that means you might require changes to the recruitment process, please contact your recruiter to discuss this further. Our aim is to make your application as easy and comfortable as possible, and your recruiter will be happy to work with you to make any necessary arrangements where possible.

Security Clearance/Vetting

The successful candidate will hold or will be required to obtain Security Clearance (SC) level vetting.