Fraud Manager

Company Mission

Payhawk is a leading global spend management solution for scaling businesses. Headquartered in London and combining company cards, reimbursable expenses and accounts payable into a single product; its future-facing technology enables finance teams to control and automate company spending at scale.

The Payhawk customer base includes fast-growing and mature multinational companies in 32 countries including LuxAir and Wagestream. With offices in New York, London, Berlin, Munich , Barcelona, Paris, Amsterdam, Vilnius and Sofia; Payhawk is backed by renowned investors such as Lightspeed Venture Partners, Greenoaks, QED Investors, Bek Ventures and Eleven Ventures.

Our values include supporting flat hierarchies, taking ownership and responsibility, seeking and providing feedback, managing constructive critique, and speaking our minds. We understand that the best ideas don’t all come from the same place, so we encourage diversity and inclusion in all areas of our work.

The future of fintech is about more than money, it is about continual learning and empowered teams. We’re also on a journey to measure and improve our environmental and social impact. From virtual cards to digital subscriptions, our software and automation help take paper out of the equation for our customers, too.

We’re changing the world of payments, and we’re looking for an exceptional team to help us. 

About the Role

Fraud prevention is becoming a discipline of its own at Payhawk, and this is the role that leads it
across both our licensed entities.
Payhawk operates two electronic money institution licences, one in Lithuania supervised by the
Bank of Lithuania and one in the UK supervised by the Financial Conduct Authority. Customers
across both hold significant balances with us and transact at scale, in a business still growing
quickly.
We are expanding fraud prevention into a dedicated global function, and this role owns it. The
framework, the detection logic, the intervention model and the regulatory implementation across
both entities are yours to own and develop. You will report to the Group Chief Compliance
Officer and present to Boards and Risk Committees.
The bar we are setting is detection that produces decisions rather than more alerts, across card
and payment fraud, account takeover and account behaviour, with signals assessed in
combination and every detection resolving to a defined intervention. Reaching it means working
as closely with information security and engineering as with compliance, which is why we want
someone who can build as well as advise.
The regulatory agenda is moving quickly and we intend to stay ahead of it. The Bank of
Lithuania Fraud Prevention Guidelines are in force and explicitly aim to strengthen the powers
of fraud prevention officers. Lithuania is adopting measures aligned with the third Payment
Services Directive early, and behind them sits the EU PSD3 and Payment Services Regulation
package, adding liability for impersonation fraud, EU-wide verification of payee, enhanced
authentication and mandatory fraud intelligence sharing. You will own our implementation of all
of it across both entities, which is an unusually broad regulatory mandate for a single role.
You will work daily with information security, engineering, payments, and the compliance teams
in both entities.
How we work with AI. Payhawk builds automation for a living, and we build our control functions
the same way. Fraud is a data problem as much as a regulatory one, so we want someone
fluent with AI as a working tool: querying transaction and case data yourself, prompting well
enough to get reliable answers out of large or messy datasets, and turning a repeated analysis
into a workflow you can rerun. We will give you the tooling, the data access and the mandate to
build detection properly, and any recurring manual review is yours to remove.

Responsibilities

• Own the group fraud prevention framework across both licensed entities: policy, risk
  assessment, typologies, controls, key risk indicators and reporting
• Act as the accountable fraud owner for the licensed entities, supporting the fraud
  prevention officer duty and becoming the named counterpart to information security and
  engineering on fraud
• Run the fraud risk assessment cycle and maintain the typology library, translating both
  into changes to live controls
• Design and implement fraud detection: rules, scenarios and thresholds, anomaly
  detection for account takeover and account behaviour, and combination-of-signal logic
  that produces a decision rather than another alert
• Own the intervention model, with defined thresholds for step-up authentication, account
  freeze, customer contact and recovery, so that detection consistently results in action
• Own fraud detection configuration and tuning in our monitoring and fraud management
  platform, and drive the fraud workstream jointly with information security
• Own the fraud side of shared attack surfaces with information security: phishing and
  fraudulent site takedowns, automated registration and enumeration attacks, account
  takeover, insider misuse, and abuse of wallet provisioning and step-up authentication
• Implement the Lithuanian obligations as they come into force, including the payee-side
  reversal right, unauthorised transaction assessment and burden of proof, customer fraud
  communications, and information sharing between payment service providers
• Lead readiness for PSD3 and the Payment Services Regulation across both entities
• Own fraud management information and Board reporting, including losses, near misses,
  recovery, detection performance and false positive rates
• Manage the interface with payments on fraud-driven chargebacks and disputes, and use
  dispute outcomes as a feedback loop into detection
  Deliver fraud training to the business and meet customer-facing fraud awareness
  obligations

Requirements

• Genuine fluency with AI in your day-to-day work. You can pull your own data and reports
  from connected systems, prompt well enough to get reliable answers out of large
  document sets and datasets, and build a repeatable workflow from a few chained steps.
  You have built something yourself, whether a workflow, a set of prompts, a report or a
  small automation that saved you real time, and you can walk us through it
• Real payments fraud expertise across card issuing fraud, account takeover, phishing
  and social engineering, authorised push payment fraud, enumeration and card number
  attacks, and abuse of wallet provisioning
• Experience building or materially upgrading a fraud programme, not only operating one
  that already existed
• Hands-on experience configuring and tuning a fraud or transaction monitoring platform,
  and the ability to reason quantitatively about false positive and false negative trade-offs
• Data fluency: you can interrogate transaction data yourself and form a view without
  waiting for an analyst
• Working knowledge of the EU and UK fraud regulatory pipeline, including strong
  customer authentication, PSD3 and the Payment Services Regulation, the Instant
  Payments Regulation and verification of payee, and national fraud rules
• Able to operate across compliance, information security, engineering and payments
  without formal authority over any of them, and to hold a position when challenged
• Comfortable owning numbers and being measured on fraud loss, detection performance,
  false positives and intervention times
• Fluent written and spoken English

Nice to have

• Experience in a Lithuanian or UK regulated entity, or direct exposure to the Bank of
  Lithuania or the Financial Conduct Authority
• Experience as a named fraud prevention officer or equivalent
• Card scheme rules knowledge, and chargeback and dispute experience
• SQL and Python, and practical use of machine learning for anomaly detection
• An information security or fraud-adjacent security background
• Additional European languages, including Lithuanian

Company Benefits

• 30 days holiday paid leave
• Competitive compensation package
• Two-week exchange policy to another Payhawk office (London, Berlin, Barcelona, Sofia)
• Flexible working hours and opportunity to work from home
• Regular team-wide events
• Additional Medical care
• Opportunity to use the Payhawk product