Description

👋 About Us

NALA is building Payments for the Next Billion. Faster, smarter, and fairer transfers for everyone. Since 2022, we've grown our business 120x, grown the team from 9 to 150+, raised $50M+ from top-tier investors, and were named to the Forbes Fintech 50 in 2025.

We Operate Two Core Products

• NALA, our consumer app making cross-border payments cheaper, faster and more reliable for the global diaspora. Allowing users to send money from the UK, US and EU to Africa and Asia.
• Rafiki, our B2B payments infrastructure, is powering global payments.

Our team includes alumni from Wise, Stripe, Monzo, Revolut, and CashApp — operators who’ve scaled world-class products. We act with urgency, think deeply, and put our customers first always.

At NALA, this isn’t just a job. It’s ownership, impact, and the chance to change global payments forever.

Join us in building [Payments for the Next Billion](https://www.nala.com/blog/nalas-updated-mission#:~:text=When I started building NALA,are more urgent than ever.).

🙌 Your Mission

Your mission is to build and lead a world-class compliance and risk function that enables NALA to scale safely across consumer and B2B payments. You will protect our customers, licences and reputation while helping the business move at the pace that being NALA requires. Your regulatory leadership is focused on our Western licensed markets - the UK, EU, US, Canada and Australia - with our Africa and emerging-markets footprint folded into your remit over time. This spans both our consumer app and the infrastructure powering some of the world's largest payments companies.

Compliance at NALA is not a blocker function. It is the function that decides which corridors we open, which products we launch, which acquisitions we close, and which regulators we earn the trust of. Done well, it is our most defensible competitive advantage. This role is both the guardian of NALA's licence to operate and a growth partner that helps us find compliant ways to put innovative financial products in front of customers in frontier markets.

Requirements

🎯 Your Responsibilities in this Role

• Lead and enable NALA's global group of MLROs and BSA/AML officers across the UK, EU (Belgium), US and Canada. Our Africa compliance lead joins this group over time - reporting primarily to Benji to begin with, on a dotted line to you.
• Own NALA's global compliance strategy across AML/CTF, sanctions, consumer protection, licensing, regulatory reporting, financial crime and fraud controls, covering both the NALA consumer business and the Rafiki B2B infrastructure platform.
• Act as both the guardian of NALA's licence to operate - maintaining the compliance infrastructure and standards regulators expect, staying clear of any criminal lines, and proactively helping regulators - and a growth- and customer-focused partner who helps the business find compliant ways to deliver innovative financial products to customers in frontier markets.
• Act as NALA's most senior regulatory leader, building trusted relationships with regulators (FCA, NBB, FinCEN and US state regulators, and others), banking partners, and acquirer counterparties.
• Continuously acquire and maintain the licences NALA needs to operate. This includes scaling NALA's US footprint from current licensed states to 30+, and building the US-resident compliance presence required for the highest-volume states (CA, NY, TX, NJ, MA, WA).
• Own risk management across the organisation. Run NALA's enterprise risk framework and steer the Risk Committee, so that risk is identified, owned and managed beyond compliance alone.
• Lead integration and M&A-related compliance activity on a rolling basis, including the in-flight regulated acquisitions in the UK and EU - owning change-of-control submissions, integration planning, and the operationalisation of acquired licence permissions.
• Build, hire and lead a high-performing compliance team.
• Lead compliance input into every new product, corridor, partnership and acquisition, including stablecoin settlement infrastructure, local currency wallets, B2B collections, and emerging markets corridors, so risk is identified early and managed effectively.
• Own the regulatory examinations and audit cycle across NALA's licensed entities, including upcoming audits in Canada, the UK, and the EU. Manage remediation of any findings to a defensible standard.
• Build the Group risk and compliance framework, including an enterprise risk management system, board-level Risk & Compliance Committee, and the data architecture for direct regulatory reporting that's becoming standard in the EU, Canada and beyond.
• Create clear, decision-useful reporting for the CEO, ExCo and Board on regulatory and enterprise risk, control performance, and key compliance priorities.
• Be the executive who decides when to enable, when to challenge, and when to stop, and who can defend each of those decisions to a regulator, a board, and an acquirer.