Introduction

We’re looking for a Director of Business Operations to join our growing Europe & UK team in London or Tallinn. This role is a unique opportunity to have an impact on Wise’s mission, grow as a product leader and empower millions more people with instant, borderless money.

About the role

As our Director of Business Operations for Europe & UK, you'll be the lead orchestrator for our operations across four areas – Payment Operations, KYC, FinCrime, and Customer Support – and building the regional business operations team. Your role involves executing at a high standard across four areas:

(1) Operational Excellence. You will be responsible for scaling our operations in Europe and the UK. This means you will be setting the bar high for quality by establishing, monitoring and meeting Service Level Agreements (SLAs), and ensuring these standards are clearly communicated and achieved. You'll be the driving force behind identifying opportunities for automation, refining processes, and overseeing outsourcing initiatives. Your collaboration with our product teams will be crucial in enhancing our core offerings and reducing the need for manual intervention. You'll keep a close eye on our operational capacity, making key decisions such as scaling down certain product features or collaborating with team leads to shift or expand our workforce. Your insights will be key in pinpointing inefficiencies and managing operational costs to enable lower prices for our customers. 

(2) Operational Resilience. The financial and regulatory landscape is changing rapidly, and with it comes a need for resilience and adaptability. You'll be at the forefront, working alongside compliance and product teams to anticipate regulatory shifts and prepare our product, engineering and operations teams to practically meet these challenges head-on. Your role involves planning, project and program management, and communication with both internal as well as external parties to align requirements with your plan and our customer needs. Examples here include working with the teams on evolving the recently implemented Consumer Duty in the UK and leading the implementation of the upcoming Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) in Europe.

(3) Incident Management and Avoidance. You'll be our go-to person for incident management escalations in Europe & UK, who will be adept at identifying, resolving, and communicating issues swiftly and effectively. Your goal will be to not only handle challenging incidents with finesse but also to lead the charge in preventing them through proactive mitigation.

(4) Growing the Regional Business Operations team. You’ll be the first person in this role in Europe & UK, but certainly not the last. As you build up a clear structure and processes on how to scale our operations, you’ll have the opportunity to build a strong team to help us continue to deliver excellence and resilience in the region. 

This role will give you the opportunity to

• Choose your path to impact – we believe people are most empowered when they can act autonomously. So rather than telling you what to do, you’ll work with your team to create a vision of your own. Of course, you can always gather feedback from smart, curious people across Wise but you’ll have the freedom to make your own calls
• Grow as a leader – Grow and inspire your team to join our mission
• Get amazing exposure to the full breadth and depth of our product from customer service, fincrime, regional expansion and new product launches
• Be part of our mission to make money without borders the new normal

A bit about you

You’re data-driven. You’re proficient and comfortable with analysing millions of rows of data using an analytical tool of your choice (e.g. SQL, R, spreadsheets). You are able to prioritise the value you can add to customers and get the entire company behind you by telling a story with the insights you’ve extracted from your analysis.

• You’re friends with microeconomics. It’s exciting for you to turn an operational capacity challenge into a robust supply-demand model that you and the operational teams can use for forecasting and finding pockets of inefficiencies. You can’t wait to figure out what impact will a particular marginal change have on our operations or our customers, be it understanding the relationship of operational costs on pricing or which parts of automation will have actual impact on customer happiness.
• You’re persuasive. You’ve mastered the ability to use logic, reason, and evidence to convince operational, product, and engineering leads, boards, and external parties to change their view and head in the direction you’ve set. Explaining a complicated topic in a clear and structured manner to our regulators should be something that you look forward to.
• You’re structured. Project management is not a chore for you – it’s a lifestyle. You find joy in taking something vague, chunking it up into logical pieces, flipping it around, fitting it into a time dimension, while also making it incredibly easy to interact with people who are far from the detail.
• You get things done. You have a history of achieving remarkable things, from running large scale projects to building something of your own (a startup, a product, etc.). You’re able to show the tenacity it took you to achieve it, you’re clear on the decisions you made, the challenges you faced, and the learnings that would make you do the same thing differently.
• You can lead, inspire people and build teams. We expect the area of Business Operations to grow in Europe, which means over time you’ll be expected to hire awesome talent and also get the best out of people. You have led and grown multiple product managers or equivalent roles before directly. You are able to get the team to dream big, align on a commonly agreed vision and draw a clear path to get there.

We're people without borders — without judgement or prejudice, too. We believe teams are strongest when they are diverse, equitable and inclusive. We're proud to have a truly international team, and we celebrate our differences.

Every Wiser should feel that they can be themselves at work. Inclusive teams help us live our values and make sure every Wiser feels respected, empowered to share their contributions towards mission zero and able to progress in their careers.

Having diverse teams that reflect our diverse customer base helps us build a better product. We can be more creative and empathetic to our customer's needs and life experiences and makes sure we leave no-one behind on our journey to mission-zero.

If you want to find out more about what it's like to work at Wise visit Wise.Jobs.

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