Head Risk and Compliance

About The Company

Eversend is an all-in-one financial platform designed for Africans, African migrants, and businesses. We specialize in providing affordable cross-border payments, virtual cards, stablecoins, and investment opportunities. As a leader in using stablecoins for payments, Eversend offers users a seamless way to manage multiple currencies, send money globally, and access secure financial services through one easy-to-use platform.

Our mission is to simplify cross-border transactions, digital currencies, and investments, helping underserved markets access fast, transparent, and reliable financial tools. Eversend is transforming the way people and businesses navigate the global financial landscape.

About The Role

Eversend moves money across markets, currencies and financial systems. The quality of our risk and compliance function determines how confidently we can grow. As Head of Risk & Compliance, you will build and operate the framework that keeps the business within its regulatory obligations and risk appetite while enabling good products and sound commercial decisions.

This is a hands-on role. You will set policy and governance, and you will also do the work — from onboarding and transaction monitoring to investigations, regulatory reporting and product launches, you will understand the controls because you built and run them. You will work directly with Product, Engineering, Operations, Finance and Legal.

The role carries real authority: you can challenge, pause or escalate activity that falls outside our risk appetite or regulatory obligations, you report to the CEO, and you have direct, independent access to the Board. The goal is not to say no reflexively; it is to help the business grow without taking risks it does not understand or cannot defend.

What You’ll Own

• The enterprise risk framework: maintain the risk appetite, risk register, control framework and clear reporting to management and the Board.
• Regulatory compliance: maintain the obligations inventory, interpret regulatory change, keep policies current and ensure commitments become operating controls.
• Financial-crime controls end to end: AML/CFT, KYC, sanctions and PEP screening, transaction monitoring, investigations, suspicious-activity reporting and the Travel Rule.
• Product and operational risk: assess new products, partners, markets and material changes before launch, and ensure agreed mitigations are implemented.
• Monitoring and response: run compliance monitoring and control testing, oversee incidents and breaches, manage remediation and lead relevant regulator engagement.
• Scalable systems and evidence: use data and automation to improve control effectiveness, reduce weak manual processes and build a common group standard that is adapted to each market.
• Data Protection and compliance with the PDPO
• Business Continuity Planning and Recovery, Occupational Health and Safety

What Success Looks Like In The First Year

• Build a complete view of regulatory obligations, material risks and control gaps, with clear owners and remediation priorities.
• Establish a credible risk appetite, risk register, compliance-monitoring plan and Board reporting rhythm.
• Strengthen financial-crime controls and make monitoring, investigations and regulatory evidence more effective, proportionate and auditable

What You Get

• Compensation: competitive, discussed at interview.
• A real mandate: a CEO reporting line, direct and independent Board access, and the standing to challenge commercial decisions — backed in practice, not just on paper.
• The step up: own the whole function under your own name, rather than running it from the second chair.
• Room to build: the function is small today. You will shape it from first principles and hire as it scales, rather than inheriting someone else’s architecture.
• Breadth: exposure to product, regulatory and commercial decisions across multiple markets that few roles at larger institutions offer at this level.

Required

• Hands-on experience operating risk or compliance within a bank, payments company, licensed financial institution or similarly regulated environment — you have personally run the machinery, not supervised it from a distance.
• Direct experience operating financial-crime controls, including KYC, sanctions, transaction monitoring, investigations and regulatory reporting.
• The ability to build an enterprise risk framework and translate regulatory requirements into practical controls across product and operations.
• Independent judgment and the confidence to challenge senior decisions under commercial pressure, while remaining pragmatic and constructive.
• An automation-first instinct: faced with a weak manual control process, you reach for data, systems and Engineering support before headcount.

Strong advantage

• Experience in payments, e-money, fintech, or stablecoin infrastructure.
• Exposure to more than one African market , or to UK/EU regulated entities.
• A track record of building or materially strengthening a risk or compliance function.

Who This Is For

The most likely fit is the brilliant number two or three in a bank or fintech’s risk or compliance function — the person who actually runs the alerts, cases, controls and evidence. while someone more senior fronts the committees. You are ready to own the whole framework, build it your way and answer for it. Titles and years matter less to us than what you have personally built, caught, tuned and decided. This is a builder role in a founder-led company: the team is small today, and you will work in the detail while creating a function that scales.

By submitting this application, I agree that my personal data will be collected, processed, and retained by the company solely for the purposes of managing and assessing my candidacy.

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