Global Financial Crimes Firco Continuity Director (AVP)

Global Financial Crimes (GFC): Firco Continuity Specialist - Director (AVP)

In the Legal & Compliance division, we assist the Firm in achieving its business objectives by facilitating and overseeing the Firm's management of legal, regulatory and franchise risk. This is a Director level position within the Global Screening Team. As part of Morgan Stanley's commitment to preventing and detecting sanctions evasion, money laundering and other forms of financial crime, the Firm relies on high-performing, well-tuned screening controls. Firco Continuity forms the backbone of these controls and must be maintained, optimized, and governed across jurisdictions and business units. This role ensures that Firco systems remain operationally resilient, up to date, and aligned with regulatory expectations across OFAC, EU, UK, UN, and local regimes.

Since 1935, Morgan Stanley is known as a global leader in financial services, always evolving and innovating to better serve our clients and our communities in more than 40 countries around the world.

What You'll Do In The Role:

• Oversee daily health checks, continuity controls, and performance monitoring for Firco Name and Transaction Screening platforms.
• Maintain configuration libraries, watchlists, hotlists, and filter settings to ensure consistency and integrity across regions.
• Conduct root-cause analysis of system failures, stoppages, latency issues, and false positive spikes.
• Ensure sanctions screening coverage is monitored and reported upon, and is line with the Firms risk appetite and that any gaps are identified, logged and escalated.
• Support development, testing, and deployment of screening rules and filter logic to enhance detection and reduce noise.
• Manage test data creation (fudge data), scenario validation, and regression testing (mirroring processes in rule-writing and sanctions model oversight).
• Prepare summaries, status reporting, and thematic issue logs for senior management and governance forums; Retain governance documentation to support audits, regulatory examinations, and internal assurance reviews.
• Partner with GFC SMEs, Sanctions Compliance, AML IT, Operations, and Business Units for continuity planning, system enhancement, and change the bank activities.
• Manage an effective team of functional specialists overseeing the ongoing maintenance of the Firco tool.

What You'll Bring To The Role:

• 5+ years of experience in sanctions screening, AML screening operations, filtering systems (e.g., Firco Continuity/Trust), or broader financial crime technology roles.
• Bachelor's degree in Business, Finance, Computer Science, or related field (advanced degree preferred)
• Experience of List Management / List testing initiatives - involving sanctions regulatory lists (e.g., OFAC / UN / EU etc.,) as well as company specific / internal lists.
• Experience conducting or overseeing system testing and tuning in a financial institution.
• Background in due diligence, corporate intelligence, or KYC/AML preferred
• Strong understanding of sanctions programs (OFAC, OFSI, EU, UN) and AML/KYC principles.
• Familiarity with screening models, fuzzy matching algorithms, configuration and data quality controls.
• Proficiency with SQL, Excel, Fircosoft FMM & FML tools (or similar) and analysis of large datasets.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to produce clear summaries for senior stakeholders.
• Strong interpersonal skills and ability to collaborate across regions and business units.
• High attention to detail and structured approach to documentation.

At Morgan Stanley, we raise, manage and allocate capital for our clients helping them reach their goals. We do it in a way that's differentiated and we've done that for 90 years. Our values - putting clients first, doing the right thing, leading with exceptional ideas, committing to diversity and inclusion, and giving back - aren't just beliefs, they guide the decisions we make every day to do what's best for our clients, communities and more than 80,000 employees in 1,200 offices across 42 countries. At Morgan Stanley, you'll find an opportunity to work alongside the best and the brightest, in an environment where you are supported and empowered. Our teams are relentless collaborators and creative thinkers, fueled by their diverse backgrounds and experiences. We are proud to support our employees and their families at every point along their work-life journey, offering some of the most attractive and comprehensive employee benefits and perks in the industry. There's also ample opportunity to move about the business for those who show passion and grit in their work.