Product Owner - Sanctions Screening & Payments

Product Owner – Sanctions Screening & Payments

Stay Ahead with the Latest Openings

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.
• 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
• Agile / Scrum
• Stakeholder Management
• Data Analysis
• Regulatory & Risk Controls

Payments Domain:

• SWIFT
• ISO 20022
• Real-Time Payments
• Request-to-Pay
• Domestic Payments
• Cross-Border Payments
• High-Value Payments
• Low-Value Payments
• Mass Payments

Sanctions Screening Domain:

• Transaction Screening
• Customer / Client Screening
• Fuzzy Matching
• Phonetic Matching
• Linguistic Normalization
• Sanctions Lists
• Alert Management
• Case Management
• 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