Risk Operations Specialist ? Finance

Role: Risk Operations Specialist - Finance

Location: Austin, TX or CST Time Zone in US

Job Summary

We are looking for a Risk Operations Specialist to support financial risk management, transaction monitoring, fraud prevention, and operational risk activities. The ideal candidate will analyze financial transactions and customer/account data, identify potential risks, investigate exceptions, and work with internal teams to resolve issues while ensuring compliance with company policies and regulatory requirements.

Key Responsibilities

• Monitor financial transactions, accounts, and operational activities to identify potential fraud, financial risk, and suspicious behavior.

• Review and investigate alerts generated through risk and transaction-monitoring systems.

• Perform detailed analysis of transactions, customer profiles, and supporting documentation.

• Identify unusual patterns, anomalies, and potential risk indicators.

• Conduct investigations and document findings, decisions, and recommended actions.

• Escalate high-risk or suspicious cases according to established procedures.

• Support KYC, AML, fraud prevention, sanctions screening, and financial crime risk processes.

• Perform customer and transaction due diligence as required.

• Review chargebacks, payment disputes, account restrictions, and other financial-risk events.

• Maintain accurate case records and ensure timely resolution of assigned investigations.

• Work closely with Compliance, Fraud, Finance, Operations, Customer Support, and Legal teams.

• Prepare risk reports, dashboards, and management summaries.

• Identify recurring operational issues and recommend process improvements.

• Follow internal controls, risk policies, procedures, and applicable regulatory requirements.

• Assist with audits, compliance reviews, and periodic risk assessments.

• Meet established productivity, quality, accuracy, and turnaround-time targets.

Required Skills & Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Finance, Accounting, Business, Economics, Risk Management, or a related field.

• 2-5+ years of experience in financial operations, risk operations, fraud, AML/KYC, transaction monitoring, or banking/fintech operations.

• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills.

• Experience reviewing financial transactions and identifying suspicious or unusual activity.

• Good understanding of financial risk and operational risk concepts.

• Strong attention to detail and ability to handle sensitive information.

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.

• Ability to investigate issues independently and make sound risk-based decisions.

• Strong Excel skills, including VLOOKUP/XLOOKUP, Pivot Tables, filtering, and data analysis.

• Ability to work with large datasets and multiple systems simultaneously.

Preferred Skills

• Experience with AML, KYC, CDD/EDD, sanctions, fraud detection, or transaction monitoring.

• Familiarity with banking, payments, credit cards, lending, or fintech environments.

• Experience with risk-management or case-management platforms.

• Knowledge of SQL and data-analysis tools is a plus.

• Familiarity with Power BI/Tableau is desirable.

• Understanding of regulations and frameworks related to financial crime and risk management.

• Experience working with automated risk-scoring or fraud-detection systems.

Key Competencies

• Risk assessment and investigation

• Transaction monitoring

• Fraud detection and prevention

• Financial analysis

• Data analysis

• Problem solving

• Attention to detail

• Decision making

• Case management

• Regulatory compliance

• Stakeholder management

• Process improvement

Typical Tools & Technologies

• Microsoft Excel

• SQL

• Power BI / Tableau

• Risk & fraud monitoring platforms

• Case-management systems

• Banking/payment platforms

• KYC/AML screening tools

• Jira / ServiceNow or similar workflow tools

Education

Bachelor's degree in Finance, Accounting, Business Administration, Economics, Risk Management, or a related discipline.