Location: New York, NY / Remote Employment Type: Contract-to-Hire (C2H) Experience: 5+ Years Industry: Banking / Financial Services / FinTech
Position Overview
We are seeking an experienced Product Owner – Sanctions Screening & Payments to lead the product vision, roadmap, and delivery of a sanctions screening and payment enablement platform.
The ideal candidate will have strong experience working in regulated financial services environments, with hands-on knowledge of sanctions screening, payment processing, financial crime compliance, and transaction monitoring workflows.
The Product Owner will work closely with Compliance, Financial Crimes, Risk, Operations, Engineering, Data, and Technology teams to deliver regulatory-compliant, high-performing screening capabilities that enable effective detection, investigation, and escalation of potential sanctions exposure across transactions, clients, and reference data.
The successful candidate will own product outcomes, roadmap prioritization, stakeholder alignment, and continuous improvement, with a focus on reducing false positives, improving investigation and match-resolution times, maintaining system availability, and ensuring audit-ready controls.
Key Responsibilities
1. Product Vision & Roadmap
Define and maintain the product vision and strategy for the Sanctions Screening and Payments platform.
Develop and manage an outcome-focused product roadmap aligned with regulatory requirements, business objectives, and risk priorities.
Prioritize product capabilities using data-driven analysis and risk-weighted business value.
Balance regulatory commitments, business enhancements, technology modernization, technical debt, model tuning, and control improvements.
Define and track product KPIs and success metrics.
2. Backlog Management & Agile Delivery
Translate business, compliance, operational, and regulatory requirements into clear epics, features, user stories, and acceptance criteria.
Own and maintain a prioritized product backlog.
Lead backlog refinement, sprint planning, sprint reviews, and release planning in partnership with Engineering and Technology teams.
Work closely with developers, architects, data teams, QA, and SMEs to ensure successful delivery.
Coordinate releases, UAT, production validation, and post-release reviews.
Ensure delivered capabilities meet functional, performance, regulatory, and operational requirements.
3. Sanctions Compliance, Risk & Controls
Partner with Compliance, Financial Crimes, Legal, Risk, and Operations teams to translate sanctions policies and regulatory requirements into product capabilities.
Ensure sanctions screening workflows support appropriate detection, investigation, disposition, escalation, and reporting processes.
Build and maintain controls supporting auditability, evidence capture, traceability, approvals, and regulatory reporting.
Support change management and validation activities associated with regulatory, policy, list, and screening-rule changes.
Ensure product capabilities align with model governance and applicable risk-management frameworks.
Coordinate UAT and production validation with appropriate business and control approvals.
4. Stakeholder Management
Act as the primary product liaison across Compliance, Financial Crimes, Payments, Operations, Technology, Engineering, Data, Risk, and senior leadership.
Facilitate requirements gathering and drive alignment across business and technology stakeholders.
Communicate product strategy, roadmap priorities, delivery status, risks, dependencies, and outcomes to leadership.
Manage competing priorities and make data-driven product decisions.
Build strong relationships across cross-functional teams and drive consensus where requirements conflict.
5. Payments & Data
Work with payment stakeholders to understand screening requirements across domestic, cross-border, high-value, low-value, real-time, instant, and mass payments.
Demonstrate understanding of payment messaging and standards, including SWIFT and ISO 20022.
Understand how sanctions screening integrates with payment initiation, processing, clearing, settlement, and exception-handling workflows.
Partner with data teams to define requirements for customer, transaction, reference, and sanctions-list data.
Support data-quality initiatives and ensure required data is available for effective screening and investigation.
Analyze product and operational data to identify opportunities for improving screening effectiveness and efficiency.
6. Screening & Operational Excellence
Drive continuous improvement in screening accuracy, performance, and operational efficiency.
Identify opportunities to reduce false positives while maintaining appropriate sanctions detection coverage.
Improve alert investigation and match-resolution workflows to reduce handling time.
Monitor product and operational KPIs, including alert volumes, false-positive rates, match-resolution time, system availability, processing latency, and operational SLAs.
Partner with engineering and operations teams on observability, monitoring, logging, dashboards, incident management, and production support.
Identify and prioritize opportunities for automation and workflow optimization.
7. Delivery Governance & Audit Readiness
Ensure product documentation, requirements, decisions, approvals, testing evidence, and release artifacts are maintained and audit-ready.
Track dependencies, risks, issues, and delivery milestones.
Support internal and external audits by providing appropriate product and control documentation.
Ensure product changes follow established governance, risk, compliance, and change-management processes.
Maintain clear traceability from regulatory/business requirements through implementation, testing, approval, and production deployment.
Required Qualifications
5+ years of experience in Product Management or Product Owner roles within banking, financial services, payments, or FinTech.
Mandatory: Hands-on experience with Sanctions Screening / Sanctions Compliance.
Strong understanding of payment sanctions screening and financial crime compliance processes.
Experience with sanctions screening for payments, clients/customers, counterparties, or trade-related activities.
Strong understanding of payment processing and payment lifecycle concepts.
Experience with SWIFT and/or ISO 20022 payment messaging.
Experience across payment types such as:
Real-Time / Instant Payments
Domestic Payments
Cross-Border Payments
High-Value Payments
Low-Value Payments
Mass Payments
Request-to-Pay
Strong experience with Agile/Scrum methodologies, backlog management, sprint planning, and product delivery.
Proven ability to translate complex business, regulatory, and compliance requirements into actionable product requirements.
Excellent stakeholder management, communication, facilitation, and decision-making skills.
Strong analytical and problem-solving capabilities.
Preferred / Desired Qualifications
Experience with sanctions lists and regulatory regimes, including:
OFAC
UK Sanctions
European Union (EU)
United Nations (UN)
Experience with enterprise sanctions screening platforms and technologies.
Understanding of screening techniques, including:
Fuzzy Matching
Phonetic Matching
Linguistic Normalization
Name/Alias Resolution
Transliteration
Watchlist Matching
Screening Rules and Thresholds
List and Reference Data Lifecycle Management
Experience with sanctions alert and case-management workflows, including investigation, disposition, escalation, and approval processes.
Understanding of model tuning, screening effectiveness, and false-positive reduction.
Experience with enterprise observability and operational tooling, including logs, metrics, dashboards, monitoring, and alerting.
Experience with risk and control frameworks, audit processes, evidence management, and regulatory governance.
Experience working with data analysis, data quality, and reporting.
Core Skills
Mandatory:
Sanctions Screening / Sanctions Compliance
Payments
Product Ownership / Product Management
Financial Services / Banking / FinTech
Agile / Scrum
Backlog & Roadmap Management
Stakeholder Management
Data Analysis
Regulatory & Risk Controls
Payments Domain:
SWIFT
ISO 20022
Real-Time Payments
Instant Payments
Request-to-Pay
Domestic Payments
Cross-Border Payments
High-Value Payments
Low-Value Payments
Mass Payments
Sanctions Screening Domain:
Watchlist Screening
Transaction Screening
Customer / Client Screening
Fuzzy Matching
Phonetic Matching
Linguistic Normalization
Alias Resolution
Sanctions Lists
Alert Management
Case Management
Disposition & Escalation
False-Positive Reduction
Screening Optimization
Core Competencies & Behaviors
Client Obsessed – Understand customer and business needs and deliver meaningful outcomes.
Spark Progress – Challenge the status quo and continuously improve products and processes.
Own It – Take accountability for product outcomes, decisions, and delivery.
Stay Curious – Continuously learn about regulatory, payment, technology, and industry developments.
Thrive Together – Collaborate effectively across business, technology, compliance, risk, and operations teams.
Key Success Metrics
Success in this role will be measured through improvements in:
Reduction in sanctions screening false-positive rates
Improved alert and match-resolution times
Screening accuracy and effectiveness
Payment processing performance and availability
Operational SLA adherence
Improved investigator/user experience
Regulatory and audit readiness
Quality and traceability of controls and evidence
Successful delivery of regulatory and strategic roadmap commitments
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