Kritika Ajwani
Northampton,Northamptonshire
Summary
Highly analytical Risk and Compliance Specialist with extensive experience in 2nd Line of Defence (2LoD) oversight and Quality Assurance across Tier-1 UK banks and fintechs, including Monzo Bank, Lloyds Banking Group and Yorkshire/Clydesdale Bank. Expert in the end-to-end knowledge of complex customer complaints, mortgage litigation remediation, and fraud detection (APP, AML, and HNW Source of Wealth). I possess a proven track record of ensuring 100% adherence to FCA regulations, Consumer Duty, and TCF outcomes. I am technically proficient in navigating 28+ banking systems, using SQL for data extraction and Salesforce/Respond for workflow management to translate raw data into high-impact MI reports for senior leadership and Risk Committees. A proactive leader in "Case Clinics" and "Check the Checker" audits, I bridge the gap between operational output and regulatory excellence. By leveraging G Suite, Slack, and Salesforce, I drive process improvements that mitigate reputational risk and enhance the customer journey.
Overview
10
10
years of professional experience
Work history
Senior Complaints COp
Monzo Bank
2024.02 - 2026.01
- End-to-end Complaint Ownership: Managing complex customer complaints from initial contact to final resolution, consistently achieving fair outcomes while maintaining Monzo’s high standards for empathy and transparency.
- Cross-functional Collaboration: Partnered with product squads, legal teams, and external stakeholders to gather technical insights and resolve multi-faceted disputes effectively.
- Root Cause Analysis & Process Improvement: Analysing complaint data to identify recurring friction points, leading to recommendations that streamlined internal workflows and improved overall user experience.
- Regulatory Compliance: Guaranteed 100% adherence to FCA guidelines and internal Quality Assurance (QA) frameworks, ensuring all final response letters (FRs) met strict regulatory deadlines.
- Data Management: Maintained meticulous records of customer interactions and resolutions, ensuring clear audit trail and high data integrity within CRM.
- Stakeholder Reporting: Delivered regular performance insights to leadership, highlighting key trends and suggesting actionable strategies to reduce complaint volumes.
- Industry Expertise: Applied deep understanding of Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) best practices and Consumer Duty standards to ensure all decisions were robust and defensible.
- Mentorship & Onboarding: Acted as subject matter expert for team, providing technical guidance on tricky cases and leading training of new joiners to scale department’s capabilities.
Risk/Compliance Analyst (Housing Schemes)
Homes England, UK
2023.11 - 2024.01
- Thematic Reviews & Monitoring: Executed thematic reviews and compliance monitoring for Help to Buy portfolio, ensuring all account activities remained strictly aligned with FCA regulations and government lending standards.
- Arrears & Risk Mitigation: Critically reviewed arrears management and mortgage handling processes to identify policy breaches, providing actionable recommendations that successfully mitigated financial and reputational risks.
- TCF & Ethical Lending: Conducted "Deep Dive" audits on borrower profiles and repayment strategies to guarantee adherence to Treating Customers Fairly (TCF) outcomes and ethical lending benchmarks.
- Financial Crime & Data Integrity: Monitored high-risk account modifications for indicators of financial crime, ensuring all administrative actions were fully compliant with UK GDPR and Money Laundering Regulations.
- Stakeholder Reporting: Produced comprehensive compliance and risk reports for Risk Committee and senior stakeholders, highlighting arrears trends, policy exceptions, and robustness of control frameworks.
- Regulatory SME: Served as a Subject Matter Expert (SME) for Arrears team, translating complex legislative changes into clear, operational procedures to ensure ongoing regulatory alignment.
- Cross-Functional Liaison: Collaborated with internal legal and audit departments to ensure customer correspondence and repayment modifications remained legally robust and compliant with Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED).
- Risk Intelligence & Dashboards: Designed and maintained sophisticated risk dashboards for Executive Director and Board, visualising Key Risk Indicators (KRIs) and exposure trends to support strategic decision-making.
- Data Validation: Extracted and validated complex risk data from core source systems, ensuring a "single version of truth" for all internal and external reporting.
- Market Analysis: Analysed market data and partner intelligence to identify emerging macro-economic risks, such as construction cost inflation and its impact on housing market.
- Insight Translation: Transformed raw datasets into meaningful insights, enabling stakeholders to understand complex risk profiles and potential impact on Help to Buy portfolio.
- Departmental Synergy: Worked closely with Credit Risk, Finance, and Programme teams to align reporting outputs and ensure a unified approach to risk management across organisation.
Management Information Analyst
Admiral Insurance
2023.05 - 2023.10
- Data Integrity & Governance: Managed end-to-end reconciliation of complex datasets and documented reporting workflows to ensure "gold-standard" data quality and robust audit trail.
- Regulatory Compliance: Guaranteed all MI outputs adhered to strict data governance standards and regulatory frameworks, specifically supporting Fair Value Assessments and Consumer Duty requirements.
- Proactive Trend Analysis: Leveraged analytical tools to identify emerging patterns in customer behaviour, claims frequency, and financial risk, providing early-warning insights to senior management.
- Ad-hoc Business Intelligence: Acted as key point of contact for stakeholders across business, delivering rapid, high-impact data analysis to resolve urgent operational challenges and support tactical decision-making.
- Cross-Departmental KPI Management: Developed and maintained suite of automated daily, weekly, and monthly KPI dashboards for Operations, Marketing, and Underwriting, enabling data-led performance tracking.
- Stakeholder Engagement: Translated complex data findings into clear, actionable insights for non-technical stakeholders, ensuring reporting aligned with departmental strategic goals.
Fraud Investigator and Operation Specialist
Barclays PLC
2023.02 - 2023.04
- Real-time Threat Detection: Monitored live detection engine queues to identify and mitigate high-risk activity, including transaction velocity spikes, out-of-pattern geographical spending, and high-risk merchant category exposures.
- Rapid Payment Intervention: Executed immediate loss-mitigation strategies by placing 'Stop/Hold' orders on suspicious payments and implementing temporary account freezes to prevent further asset dissipation.
- Customer Authentication & Vulnerability: Managed high-stakes customer interactions to authenticate transactions, providing tailored 'Scam Education' and identifying signs of social engineering or customer vulnerability.
- Complex Fraud Investigations: Led end-to-end investigations into sophisticated fraud typologies, including Authorised Push Payment (APP) fraud, romance scams, and investment fraud, ensuring compliance with CRM code.
- Digital Forensics & Compromise Analysis: Analysed digital footprints—including IP addresses, device fingerprinting, and 'known device' history—to determine root cause of security compromises and account takeovers (ATO).
- Regulatory Filings & External Liaison: Prepared and submitted Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) and compiled comprehensive evidence packs for Action Fraud and National Fraud Intelligence Bureau (NFIB).
- Risk Mitigation: Collaborated with wider Financial Crime team to refine detection rules and reduce 'False Positives' while maintaining a robust perimeter against emerging fraud trends.
KYC/ Compliance Analyst
Hiscox Business Insurance
2021.11 - 2023.01
- Complex Corporate Due Diligence: Investigated intricate ownership structures for commercial entities to identify Ultimate Beneficial Owners (UBOs), ensuring premiums were not utilised for money laundering or terrorist financing.
- Sanctions & Embargo Management: Conducted rigorous screening of policyholders and claimants against global lists (OFAC, UK HMT, EU), preventing potential breaches of international sanctions and ensuring no payments reached prohibited regimes.
- Source of Wealth Analysis: Performed deep-dive investigations into Source of Wealth and Source of Funds for High-Net-Worth (HNW) clients to prevent indemnification of illicitly acquired assets.
- Enhanced Due Diligence (EDD): Managed high-risk referrals involving Politically Exposed Persons (PEPs) and Adverse Media, providing MLRO with comprehensive risk summaries and actionable recommendations.
- Regulatory Quality Assurance: Executed thematic audits of underwriting files to ensure 100% adherence to FCA Consumer Duty and Treating Customers Fairly (TCF) standards.
- Product Governance & Conduct Risk: Reviewed policy wordings and marketing collateral to ensure all communications were 'Clear, Fair, and Not Misleading,' maintaining highest standards of conduct risk management.
- Root Cause & Systemic Risk Analysis: Analysed complaint data to identify and report systemic compliance failures to Risk Committee, facilitating proactive improvements to internal control frameworks.
- Reviewing insurance policy wording and marketing materials to ensure these are not misleading and meet regulatory 'Clear, Fair, and Not Misleading' requirements.
- Analysing root causes of complaints to identify systemic compliance failures and reporting these to Risk Committee.
Compliance Analyst
Baxter Healthcare
2020.02 - 2021.10
- Healthcare Professional (HCP) Interactions: Managed end-to-end compliance oversight of interactions with Healthcare Professionals and Organisations, ensuring all grants, sponsorships, and consulting agreements adhered to ABPI Code of Practice and MedTech Europe Code.
- Third-Party Risk Management: Conducted robust Due Diligence and Know Your Partner (KYP) screenings for distributors and suppliers, mitigating risks related to bribery, corruption (UK Bribery Act), and modern slavery within supply chain.
- Policy Governance & Training: Developed and implemented internal compliance policies and Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), delivering tailored training sessions to Sales and Marketing teams to ensure a culture of "Integrity in Action."
- Monitoring & Auditing: Executed proactive monitoring programmes and thematic audits of expense reports, educational grants, and inventory records to identify potential non-compliance with Baxter’s Global Code of Conduct.
- Data Privacy & UK GDPR: Acted as a key point of contact for data privacy queries, ensuring that patient and employee data processing activities remained compliant with UK GDPR and internal Data Privacy Impact Assessments (DPIAs).
- Ethics Helpline & Investigations: Supported investigation of reports raised through Ethics & Compliance Helpline, preparing detailed case files and recommending corrective and preventive actions (CAPAs) to senior leadership.
- Regulatory Reporting: Compiled and validated data for annual Transparency Reporting (Disclosure UK), ensuring accurate public disclosure of transfers of value made to healthcare community.
- Cross-Functional Advisory: Partnered with Legal, Finance, and Quality departments to provide regulatory guidance on new product launches and market access strategies, ensuring "compliance by design."
Quality Assurance Analyst
Lloyds Banking Group
2018.03 - 2020.01
- 'Check the Checker' Excellence: Performed rigorous QA monitoring and testing on complex customer complaint investigations, ensuring robust "Check the Checker" process that maintains high accuracy and regulatory standards.
- Case Clinics & Technical Guidance: Led "Case Clinic" meetings to deconstruct and resolve high-complexity scenarios, providing technical steer to Case Handlers to ensure consistent decision-making.
- Operational Feedback Loop: Delivered structured, constructive feedback to Quality Control (QC) colleagues and Case Handlers, driving culture of continuous improvement and reducing error rates across team.
- Assurance Framework Development: Continuously refined and enhanced Assurance Framework, specifically driving standards for mortgage litigation remediation activity to ensure it remains compliant with evolving internal and external benchmarks.
- Process Improvement & Trend Analysis: Identified systemic trends and friction points through detailed QA data, translating these into actionable process improvements that enhanced both customer experience and operational efficiency.
- MI & Data Management: Utilised broad suite of banking systems to extract, manage, and validate data, creating comprehensive Management Information (MI) reports for senior leadership to track team performance and risk.
- Stakeholder Liaison: Partnered with operational leads to establish and embed quality standards and Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), ensuring alignment across all business functions.
- Customer Remediation & Collaboration: Worked collaboratively with cross-functional teams to ensure all customer remediation activity met strict quality gates, focusing on fair and timely outcomes for bank's customers.
- Performance Leadership: Actively drove team performance by highlighting quality gaps to senior management and suggesting strategic interventions to maintain bank’s high standards of service.
Quality Assurance Analyst
Yorkshire/ Clydesdale Bank
2016.01 - 2018.02
- 2nd Line of Defence Oversight: Acted as 2nd line auditor to provide independent oversight of complaint handling, ensuring all resolutions adhered strictly to internal policies, FCA regulations, and bank’s "Right First Time" standards.
- Audit Readiness & Compliance: Orchestrated end-to-end compilation and sanitisation of case files, ensuring these were fully compliant with up-to-date guidelines prior to external audit review and issuance of Final Response Letters (FRLs).
- End-to-End Quality Benchmarking: Conducted rigorous "Check the Checker" reviews across multiple departments—including Data Gathering, Case Review, and Redress—to verify that all evidence was captured and customer offer was calculated accurately.
- Systemic Data Validation: Performed comprehensive forensic checks across 28 different banking systems (including legacy Clydesdale/Yorkshire platforms) to ensure integrity and accuracy of gathered customer data.
- External Audit Liaison: Analysed feedback from external auditors, translating complex findings into actionable insights for Case Handlers and QCs to improve handling of "edge-case" or high-complexity complaints.
- Root Cause Analysis (RCA): Proactively identified and flagged recurring errors and systemic trends, collaborating with department leads to implement process improvements that streamlined customer journey.
- Risk Mitigation: Ensured that all redress calculations and decision-making frameworks met bank’s risk appetite, preventing financial leakage and reputational damage.
Education
CPD Certified - AML, KYC & CDD Training Course
Business Administration (BA Hons) - undefined
London Southbank University
Level 3 OCR National Diploma - Business and Management
Westminster College, London
CeMAP Certified - Level 1
London Institute of Banking & Finance
LondonSkills
- Excellent knowledge of Microsoft Office- Word, PowerPoint, Access and Excel
Languages
Fluent in English
Hindi
Urdu
Punjabi
References
Available on Request
Timeline
Senior Complaints COp
Monzo Bank
2024.02 - 2026.01
Risk/Compliance Analyst (Housing Schemes)
Homes England, UK
2023.11 - 2024.01
Management Information Analyst
Admiral Insurance
2023.05 - 2023.10
Fraud Investigator and Operation Specialist
Barclays PLC
2023.02 - 2023.04
KYC/ Compliance Analyst
Hiscox Business Insurance
2021.11 - 2023.01
Compliance Analyst
Baxter Healthcare
2020.02 - 2021.10
Quality Assurance Analyst
Lloyds Banking Group
2018.03 - 2020.01
Quality Assurance Analyst
Yorkshire/ Clydesdale Bank
2016.01 - 2018.02
Business Administration (BA Hons) - undefined
London Southbank University
Level 3 OCR National Diploma - Business and Management
Westminster College, London
CPD Certified - AML, KYC & CDD Training Course
CeMAP Certified - Level 1
London Institute of Banking & Finance