Director - Enterprise Fraud & Investigations

Summary

We are seeking an experienced Director of Fraud to lead the financial institution's enterprise fraud prevention, detection, investigation, and response program. 

This leader must have a deep understanding of how fraud is perpetrated across a financial institution, from initial compromise or social engineering through account access, transaction execution, movement of funds, and eventual loss. Just as importantly, this individual must understand where fraud vulnerabilities can arise across products, channels, systems, processes, people, and third parties. 

This is not solely an operational leadership role. We are looking for an experienced fraud professional and investigator who is naturally curious, knows how to follow the evidence, challenges assumptions, identifies patterns others may miss, and can translate investigative findings into meaningful improvements in fraud controls and prevention. 

The Director will lead fraud strategy and investigations while partnering closely with Risk, Information Security, Digital, Payments, Operations, Compliance/BSA-AML, Legal, Technology, Internal Audit, and business leaders to protect the institution and its members/customers.

Duties & Responsibilities

Enterprise Fraud Strategy 

• Develop and lead a comprehensive enterprise fraud program covering prevention, detection, investigation, response, recovery, and continuous improvement. 

• Maintain an enterprise view of fraud risk across products, systems, channels, processes, and third-party relationships. 

• Continually assess emerging fraud schemes, attack methods, vulnerabilities, and fraud trends and determine their potential impact on the institution. 

• Establish appropriate fraud governance, escalation standards, metrics, reporting, and accountability. 

• Provide senior management with clear reporting regarding fraud trends, losses, emerging threats, control gaps, and recommended actions. 

Fraud Expertise & Prevention 

• Maintain deep knowledge of fraud schemes affecting financial institutions, including:  

• Account takeover and identity theft 

• New-account and synthetic identity fraud 

• Check and deposit fraud 

• ACH and wire fraud 

• Debit and credit card fraud 

• P2P and real-time payment fraud 

• Online and mobile banking fraud 

• Loan and application fraud 

• Social engineering, phishing, smishing, impersonation, and scams 

• Elder/vulnerable-person financial exploitation 

• Insider and employee fraud 

• Business email compromise 

• Mule accounts and movement of illicit funds 

• First-party and third-party fraud 

• Fraud involving third-party providers and digital channels 

• Understand the end-to-end anatomy of a fraud event, including how fraudsters obtain information, compromise credentials, circumvent controls, manipulate victims or employees, access systems, move funds, and monetize an attack. 

• Evaluate whether existing controls address both known fraud patterns and emerging attack methods. 

• Turn lessons learned from actual fraud incidents into stronger preventative and detective controls. 

Investigations 

• Lead and oversee complex fraud investigations from initial identification through disposition and, when appropriate, recovery or referral. 

• Develop investigative hypotheses and reconstruct events using transaction records, authentication information, system activity, communications, account history, device and digital information, and other available evidence. 

• Identify connections among seemingly unrelated events, accounts, transactions, devices, individuals, and behaviors. 

• Determine root cause, control breakdowns, and contributing process or system weaknesses. 

• Ensure investigations are thorough, well documented, objective, and defensible. 

• Coordinate with Legal, Compliance/BSA-AML, Information Security, Human Resources and law enforcement when appropriate. 

• Establish consistent case-management and evidence/documentation standards. 

The investigative emphasis is important. ACFE describes CFEs as professionals with skills involving complex financial transactions, investigative techniques and legal issues, resolving fraud allegations, and designing anti-fraud programs.  

Fraud Detection & Analytics 

• Partner with Technology, Digital, Payments and business teams to strengthen fraud detection capabilities. 

• Evaluate fraud alerts, rules, models, thresholds and escalation processes for effectiveness. 

• Use data and analytics to identify patterns, concentrations, anomalies and emerging fraud activity. 

• Monitor false positives, missed events, fraud losses and other indicators to continually improve detection. 

• Ensure fraud systems and tools are understood and effectively utilized by the fraud organization. 

Leadership & Organizational Partnership 

• Build, develop and lead a high-performing team of investigators and fraud professionals. 

• Develop strong investigative capabilities within the team rather than relying exclusively on automated alerts or system-generated decisions. 

• Create a culture of curiosity, critical thinking, urgency and disciplined investigation. 

• Serve as the organization's fraud subject-matter expert. 

• Ensure significant fraud events are quickly escalated and coordinated across impacted areas. 

• Conduct lessons-learned/root-cause reviews following significant incidents and drive corrective actions to completion. 

Requirements

• Significant progressive experience in fraud prevention, detection and investigations within a bank, credit union, payments company, fintech or other regulated financial institution.
• Demonstrated direct experience conducting and/or leading complex financial fraud investigations.
• Deep understanding of fraud typologies, attack methods and control vulnerabilities across financial institution products and delivery channels.
• Experience investigating fraud across multiple areas rather than specialization in only one area such as card disputes.
• Strong understanding of digital banking, payments, deposit products, authentication, transaction monitoring and financial crime controls.
• Demonstrated ability to identify root cause and translate investigative findings into operational or technology improvements.
• Experience with fraud detection systems, case-management platforms, transaction monitoring and data analysis.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain complex fraud events clearly to executives and nontechnical audiences.
• Demonstrated experience leading teams and collaborating across organizational boundaries.

Professional Credentials:

Strongly preferred/required: 

• Certified Fraud Examiner (CFE) through the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners. The credential requires fraud-related professional experience and covers fraud detection/deterrence.  

Additional credentials valued: 

• Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialist (CAMS) 

• Certified AML and Fraud Professional (CAFP) 

• Certified Financial Crimes Investigator or comparable financial-crime/investigative certification 

• Relevant cybercrime, digital forensics, payments, or investigative credentials