Associate Director, Obligations Management

About the role

The Associate Director, Obligations Management will own the central governance infrastructure that identifies, catalogs, and tracks regulatory and financial partner requirements across Airwallex’s global footprint.

Responsibilities

• Architect, scale, and maintain the central Global Obligations Register, comprehensively cataloging all international regulatory rules, statutory laws, and Tier-1 financial partner requirements alongside their respective compliance controls.
• Collaborate closely with the Risk team to ensure all mapped compliance controls and reporting obligations within the registry are structured effectively for independent monitoring, validation, and testing.
• Manage and continuously evolve the centralized global RFI knowledge base, synthesizing data and insights from local Regulatory Compliance teams to curate uniform, legally defensible evidence portfolios for banking partners and regulatory bodies.
• Own the global central audit register, tracking internal audit findings, external examination gaps, and material regulatory issues to drive accountability and verify robust root-cause remediation before deadlines.
• Partner with Regional Regulatory Legal teams to ingest ongoing legal interpretations and horizon scanning data, ensuring the global obligations registry is dynamically updated to prevent compliance gaps or control drift.
• Direct and scale a high-performing obligations management team, replacing manual trackers and spreadsheet dependencies with advanced, scalable GRC tooling and automated compliance dashboards.

Requirements

• 10 to 12+ years of experience within corporate governance, regulatory compliance, internal audit, or operational risk management inside a highly regulated financial services, fintech, or banking environment.
• At least 3 to 5+ years of experience managing a compliance inventory, regulatory obligations framework, or GRC program at a senior level within a multi-jurisdictional environment.
• Proven track record of constructing complex compliance matrices, mapping internal controls to international laws, supervising audit registers, and managing institutional RFI mechanisms.
• A high-ownership, systematic approach to problem-solving, with exceptional corporate drafting skills and the cross-functional agility to align decentralized regional teams with central hub standards.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Law, Public Policy, Risk Management, Business Administration, or a related structured analytical discipline.
• Juris Doctor (JD), Master of Laws (LLM), or a Master's degree in Regulatory Compliance, Risk Management, or Business Administration.
• Professional designations such as Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialist (CAMS), Certified Internal Auditor (CIA), or equivalent GRC-related credentials.
• Deep experience working within a high-growth cross-border payments company, top-tier neobank, or API-driven digital platform handling high volumes of regulated transactions.
• Direct experience selecting, deploying, or configuring institutional Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) software systems to automate policy mapping and issue remediation workflows.