Financial Crime Investigator

Business Unit:  Risk
Salary range: £25,250 - £30,000 per annum
Location:  UK Hybrid to Glasgow/Gosforth/Leeds
Contract type: Tuesday - Saturday Full-Time 

Our Team

We’ve got a brilliant opportunity for an enthusiastic and motivated person to join our team as a Financial Crime Investigator. You’ll undertake Financial Crime Investigations and subsequent required actions through having specialist knowledge and expertise in anti-money laundering, terrorist financing and tax evasion.

What you’ll be doing

• Completing enhanced due diligence and KYC on medium and high-risk customers, ensuring VMUK is adequately risk assessing and documenting rationales for on book customers. 
• Working independently and with autonomy on periodic reviews.
• Ensuring consistent and accurate rationale on retail customer risk assessments – poorly rationalised or incorrect decisions could expose you and the back to criminal charges, reputational damage and regulatory censure.
• Effectively delivering 1st Line Financial Crime activities and processes, within quality and performance objectives, ensuring service delivery which enhances the customer experience and ensures we operate within regulatory requirements.
• Completing initial Sanction, PEP and AML investigations including assessment of PEPs against VMUK definition and immediately escalate any potential true matches, providing full information and analysis and outlining the potential impact.
• Investigating anti-money laundering transaction monitoring alerts, including performing Know Your Customer and Customer Due Diligence and interrogating financial data to assess the likelihood of financial crime.
• Working with the 2nd line Financial Crime team to provide advice and guidance to 1st line colleagues, documenting the guidance to strengthen financial crime controls to prevent future reoccurrence where possible.
• Documenting and escalate new and emerging financial crime trends and system performance in a way that can be communicated to colleagues in 2nd line to ensure ongoing, consistent system improvement.
• Reviewing High Risk Jurisdiction referrals including transactional activity and source of wealth/source of funds analysis.
• Responding to legal orders and police liaison for all VMUK enquiries and court documents, ensuring compliance to court timeframes.  This includes court attendance on behalf of VMUK Plc.

We need you to have

• Experience of working within a financial crime environment. Specifically, having worked on either anti-money laundering, terrorist financing or tax evasion investigations.
• A keen eye for detail and be able to present your findings/thoughts on investigations in a clear and concise manner
• The ability to analyse detailed information and be able to draw sophisticated conclusions and/or recommendations from the facts/data provided when handling Financial Crime Investigations.
• The ability to work autonomously with excellent time management skills
• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills
• Microsoft Office and Excel knowledge

 It’s a bonus if you have but not essential

• Experience of any AML Prevention, Detection or Investigation system
• Experience of any Sanction, PEP’s & Transaction Monitoring system

Red Hot Rewards 

• 25 days holiday per year, increasing over time to 30. Plus, an option to buy more, giving you even more choice.
• Private medical insurance
• A highly competitive pension to help you build a strong foundation for retirement
• Access to an annual performance-related bonus
• Training and development to help you progress your career
• A great selection of additional benefits through our flexible benefits scheme
• Life assurance to provide peace of mind for you and your loved ones
• Up to 2 days of paid volunteering a year

If we’re lucky to receive a lot of interest, we may close the advert early. Please ensure to submit your applications as soon as possible.  

Say hello to Virgin Money

Virgin Money is so much more than just a bank. As part of the Nationwide group, together we're the UK's first full-service mutual bank serving millions of retail and business customers and all driven by our purpose; Banking but fairer, more rewarding and for the good of society. With us, you’ll be part of an organisation uniquely positioned to make a difference to the lives of customers, communities and broader society and embark on a collaborative, customer obsessed, and fun-filled career journey. Embrace the weekdays, enjoy fantastic perks, and make a meaningful positive difference. Time to discover what it means to be part of the first mutual full-service banking provider.  

Be yourself at Virgin Money

At Virgin Money, we celebrate everyone. We have fun, think big, and relentlessly include each other, all in pursuit of our purpose: Banking – but fairer, more rewarding, and for the good of society.  We’re committed to creating an inclusive culture where colleagues feel safe and inspired to contribute, speak up and be heard.    

As a Disability Confident Leader, we're committed to removing any obstacles to inclusion.  If you need any reasonable adjustments or support making your application, contact our Talent Acquisition team careers@virginmoney.com

Please note: If we receive a high volume of eligible applications, we may need to prioritise candidates whose skills and experience most closely align with the role, while still ensuring fair and equitable consideration for all applicants.

Now the legal bit

We’re in the process of bringing Virgin Money and Nationwide together which, subject to Court approval, will happen on 2 April 2026. You can find out more about what this means at https://uk.virginmoney.com/nationwide-transfer. If you’re successful in securing a role with us, your employment will move automatically to Nationwide when this transfer goes ahead.

Although some of our roles allow you to be based anywhere in the UK, we'll need you to confirm you have the right to work in the UK. 

If you're successful in securing a role with us, there are some checks you need to complete before starting. These include credit and criminal record checks and three years' worth of satisfactory references. If the role is part of the Senior Manager Regime and Certification Regime, it requires enhanced pre-employment checks – we'll ask for six years of regulatory references, and once in the role, you'll be subject to periodic employment checks.