Head of Legal and Compliance

👆About Crezco:

Crezco is a venture capital-backed regulated payments company with a mission to make moving money easier for businesses. We aim to reduce financial friction, improve the user experience, and speed up economic progress everywhere. We do not believe businesses want to love their bank, they want the job done. Banking may be necessary, but not banks. By leveraging our open banking technology and our EMI license, we will look to continue to embed financial services into SME platforms like Xero, who already use Crezco’s API for domestic bill payments, international bill payments, payroll payments and pay-by-card. We are at the start of an exciting journey having established both product-market-fit and a go-to-market strategy, but there is 100x more to do. We are ambitious, and we will keep growing.

👇About the role:

The candidate will be the sole lead of Crezco’s legal and compliance programme overseeing strategic direction as well as deployment of effective and efficient controls. The candidate will need to create, implement and manage legal and compliance policies and procedures. We believe both legal and compliance functions are business enablers and the role-holder will sit within our senior leadership team. We build user-centric products and we adopt the same user-centric care in the design and implementation of our compliance and legal programs, whether the intended audience is our colleagues, customers, shareholders, financial services partners or the regulator. We apply a pragmatic and risk-based approach. The candidate will be expected to ensure that policies, procedures and controls are not unnecessarily complex and that innovative approaches are deployed in meeting the requirements. We do not just want to adhere to the letter of the law, but the spirit of the law.

🏗️The type of work we expect

Regulatory & Compliance

Regulatory compliance: Lead Crezco’s second line of defence to ensure compliance with applicable laws and standards, while actively engaging with the FCA as a key stakeholder in Crezco’s future. We expect you to be able to write/draft and submit regulatory documents. Within time, we would like you to assume the responsibilities of the MLRO.
Compliance policies and procedures: Ensure Crezco adopts and/or implements the correct legal/compliance policies and procedures that include, but are not limited to, the following: AML policies, Consumer Duty, data protection rules, privacy policies, KYC/B requiremetns, and fraud identification & control policies.

Audit & Governance

Regulatory audits: Lead and project manage Crezco’s annual internal and external regulatory audits. External audits will include those implemented by our infrastructure partners (regulated suppliers) and independent third-party audits.
Governance: Maintain internal governance documentation and controls.

Partner & Third-Party Oversight

Infrastructure/supplier partnerships: Crezco works with many third-party regulated infrastructure partners, like Currencycloud, ClearBank and Checkout.com. You will be expected to maintain these relationships from a regulatory perspective, and any further infrastructure partners we look to work with.
Commercial partners: Crezco’s API is used by our non-regulated platform customers like Xero and Sage. We have a responsibility to support our partners and their customers.

Legal & Commercial

Maintaince: Lead the maintaince and drafting of legal contracts and requirements, such as Privacy Agreements and Terms and Conditions.
Guidance: Provide input into product launches and new financial services initiatives acting as the primary internal expert on regulation, compliance, and legal matters.