Manager-Compliance

American Express•Phoenix, AZ

About The Position

Global Sanctions Investigations is responsible for identifying, assessing, and resolving potential sanctions concerns escalated through enterprise screening, referral, and investigative channels. The team triages potential sanctions matches, conducts enhanced due diligence, reviews internal and external information, evaluates ownership and relationship linkages, assesses transactional activity, and determines whether customer relationships should be retained, restricted, suspended, terminated, blocked, rejected, or escalated. Through timely investigation, consistent decisioning, complete documentation, and coordination with key partners, Global Sanctions Investigations helps ensure potential sanctions risks are appropriately identified, actioned, reported, and closed in alignment with enterprise standards and regulatory expectations. Working closely with the Global Sanctions Director, the Manager of Sanctions Investigations within Global Sanctions will be responsible for overseeing the end-to-end investigation, escalation, decisioning, and closure of potential sanctions matters. This role acts as a sanctions subject matter expert and primary decision-maker on whether to retain, restrict, suspend, terminate, or escalate customer relationships based on sanctions risk. By leading consistent investigative standards, strong documentation practices, timely regulatory escalation, and effective analyst oversight, the Manager helps ensure sanctions risks are identified, assessed, and resolved in alignment with enterprise standards and regulatory expectations.

Requirements

Ability to manage multiple tasks, take on additional responsibilities, and prioritize work in a deadline-intensive environment.
Ability to work on multiple work streams across multiple business lines at the same time.
Ability to operate in a complex matrix environment.
Strong people-leadership skills with the ability to motivate, engage and influence.
Support business initiatives by building and maintaining strong relationships with peers and key partners outside of the compliance organization.
Excellent communication skills, both written and verbal.
Excellent problem-solving and organizational skills.
Excellent attention to detail.
Strong personal integrity and work ethic.
Strong computer knowledge; excellent MS Word, Excel, Visio, and PowerPoint skills.
Must be self-motivated, dependable, adaptable and detail oriented with a proven ability to work independently or within a team environment.
5+ years of sanctions, financial crimes, compliance, or related investigative experience.
Experience conducting or overseeing sanctions investigations, alert adjudication, referrals, escalations, customer/account reviews, transactional analysis, or risk-based decisioning preferred.
Experience managing investigative inventory, service-level expectations, case quality, documentation standards, and analyst performance preferred.
Significant project, process improvement, or operational leadership experience.
Bachelor’s degree and/or relevant professional qualification preferred (Law Degree, Compliance/AML Diploma, CAMS Certification with a Legal/Compliance/Investigations/Control/Auditing background).
Employment eligibility to work with American Express in the United States is required as the company will not pursue visa sponsorship for these positions.

Responsibilities

Lead the Global Sanctions Investigations team responsible for triaging, investigating, escalating, decisioning, and closing potential sanctions matches and referrals.
Serve as a sanctions subject matter expert and primary decision-maker for escalated cases involving potential sanctions concerns, confirmed matches, risk-based exits, blocked property, rejected transactions, and related regulatory considerations.
Oversee investigation quality, ensuring analysts perform appropriate internal and external research, ownership and relationship analysis, transactional review, and risk-based decisioning.
Ensure all investigative conclusions, decision rationale, supporting evidence, case actions, and final dispositions are complete, accurate, and clearly documented to support audit, exam, and regulatory review.
Partner with General Counsel, Market Compliance, LOBCO/LECO, Enterprise Bank Servicing, GFCSU/FIU, and other stakeholders to resolve complex investigations and determine appropriate customer, account, reporting, or escalation actions.
Partner with 1LOD teams to ensure appropriate cancellation, suspension, blocking, restriction, or other customer/account actions are executed timely and accurately when supported by sanctions investigation outcomes.
Manage inventory, service-level expectations, and case aging to ensure sanctions matters are reviewed and resolved in a timely manner, with appropriate escalation for high-risk or overdue items.
Identify investigation trends, quality gaps, process issues, and training needs; develop action plans to improve consistency, critical thinking, documentation quality, and operational effectiveness.
Support regulatory reporting obligations, voluntary self-disclosure assessments, blocked property analysis, rejected transaction reviews, and other sanctions-related escalation requirements, as applicable.
Provide coaching, feedback, and development to analysts to strengthen sanctions expertise, investigative judgment, decision consistency, and performance against team objectives.
Successfully manage a team of analysts responsible for sanctions investigations, ensuring work is completed accurately, consistently, and within applicable service-level expectations.