KYC Operations Lead — HitPay

About HitPay

Full-stack payments infrastructure for growing APAC businesses

Tech description:

Job description:

**Location:** Singapore or remote SEA · **Team:** Compliance — KYC / Onboarding Operations · **Reports to:** Group Head of Compliance · **Manages:** 6 analysts (SG · MY · PH · ID) · **Type:** Full-time

\## About HitPay

HitPay is a full-stack payments platform serving 15,000+ SMEs across Southeast Asia and beyond, regulated in six jurisdictions (MAS, BSP, BNM, AUSTRAC, FinCEN, NZ DIA). Our KYC operation is AI-native: automation does the first pass on new merchant applications, and human analysts make the decisions that matter. Your team decides who gets to accept payments.

\## The role

You run the team that controls the front door and patrols the house: **new-merchant KYB onboarding** and the **periodic-review cycle over the live merchant book**. Both queues run through one fungible pool of six analysts across four countries — everyone works both. You own the SLA, the quality bar, the throughput, and the periodic-review programme design itself, which you will stand up in your first quarter.

\## What you'll own

\- **The onboarding review queue:** you own the end-to-end review SLA, decision quality, queue aging, and the RFI process with merchants across our core markets.

\- **The periodic-review programme (build it):** design and operate the risk-tiered re-review cycle for the live merchant book — cycle frequencies by risk rating, trigger-based reviews, evidence standards, and completion tracking. This programme is a regulator expectation in every one of our markets; you make it real and inspection-ready.

\- **A distributed team of 6, managed properly:** three experienced analysts (Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines) plus three you'll help hire and train. You run the full management cycle — goal-setting, regular 1:1s, formal performance reviews, coaching plans, and the hard conversations when standards slip — instrumented by data, not gut feel.

\- **Quality assurance on the automation:** the first-pass layer is only as good as its supervision. You sample its output, feed back systematic errors, and own the human-machine boundary — what gets streamlined, what always gets human eyes.

\- **Escalation interface:** clean handoffs to Financial Crime (suspicious onboarding patterns) and to the MLRO office (policy questions, high-risk approvals).

\- **Reporting:** onboarding funnel and SLA reporting to the Group Head of Compliance and leadership; your numbers are the compliance function's most-watched operational metrics.

\## What you'll bring

\- 4–7 years in KYC/KYB or merchant onboarding operations at a payments company, PSP, EMI, or bank — including 2+ years as a **people manager of record**, not just a senior reviewer: you have owned direct reports, run formal performance review cycles, set goals, given difficult feedback, and managed underperformance through to resolution (improvement or exit).

\- **A track record of upholding standards:** you have held a team to an SLA and a quality bar over a sustained period — and can talk specifically about what you did when the team slipped: how you diagnosed it, what you changed, and how you brought the numbers back without burning the team out.

\- Deep working knowledge of corporate registry verification in at least one of our core markets (ACRA/Singapore, SSM/Malaysia, SEC-DTI/Philippines) and risk-based CDD/EDD for SMEs.

\- Experience designing or running a periodic/ongoing-review programme — you know what "risk-tiered refresh cycle" means in practice, not just in policy.

\- Metrics-driven management: you run a queue by SLA dashboards and throughput data, and you've held a team to a service standard.

\- AI-forward operating style: you want your analysts exercising judgment, not copy-pasting registry lookups — and you know how to QA automation rather than distrust it or rubber-stamp it.

\- Comfortable managing remote, cross-country teams.

\## Nice to have

\- Experience standing up an operation (new market, new programme, new team) rather than inheriting a mature one.

\- Familiarity with MAS PSN01 / BNM / BSP customer due diligence requirements.

\- Prior exposure to fraud/AML escalation workflows from the onboarding side.

\## Why this role is unusual

Most KYC-ops jobs are about managing headcount against an ever-growing manual queue. Here the machine does the first read of every case, so the job is what it should be: judgment, quality, programme design, and building a small exceptional team — with the clearest performance instrumentation you'll find in the industry and a direct line to the Group Head of Compliance.