Scheme Compliance Function Lead

We’re looking for a Scheme Compliance Function Lead to join our Spend & Card Issuance Team in London. This role will focus on leading issuer-side scheme compliance and card disputes frameworks across Visa and Mastercard programs. It's a unique opportunity to build on your regulatory and commercial expertise, help deliver Wise’s mission of money without borders, and grow within a global, fast-paced environment while ensuring our card issuance operations remain compliant, secure, and built to scale.

Wise is a fast-growing business, so we expect that the right candidate will be able to clearly demonstrate exceptional behaviors and risk leadership that have resulted in scalable, compliant outcomes and material risk reduction in prior organizations.

Your mission

At Wise, our mission is to make money borderless — and Scheme Compliance plays a key role in making that happen. We establish robust control frameworks and operational governance that ensure Wise meets scheme obligations, protects customer outcomes, and drives maximum value from our card issuance ecosystem. Our goal? To make launching and operating card programs at Wise as compliant, resilient, and frictionless as sending money across borders. Scheme Compliance sits within our Spend & Card Issuance function, overseeing issuer obligations, monitoring programs, launches, and vendor governance. We’re a dedicated team that supports the business across all Visa and Mastercard product flows.

This is your chance to help shape what Scheme Compliance looks like at Wise — providing high evidence standards, building scalable processes, driving product integrity, and helping us create a best-in-class global issuer compliance function! Your mission is to enable, protect, and empower the business and people of Wise by ensuring our card products meet scheme rules, mitigate fraud and dispute risks, flow through frictionless operations, and support our global growth. About

the Role

• Develop and execute a 1–3 year Spend Scheme Compliance strategy that aligns with Wise's business objectives and translates into clear quarterly priorities.
• Act as the accountable leader and key stakeholder for all issuer-side scheme topics across Visa and Mastercard programs, including BIN management, thresholds, and rule interpretations.
• Manage and develop a team of Compliance Product Specialists, helping them navigate complex scheme environments through effective coaching, performance management, and clear role definitions.
• Own Card Disputes Compliance end-to-end across fraud and non-fraud disputes, ensuring rules are operationalised, risks are governed, and recovery rates are optimised.
• Lead launch integrity for new issuance initiatives (BINs, chip profiles, market expansions), ensuring correct-first-time scheme submissions and go/no-go readiness.
• Oversee scheme compliance across the issuer supply chain, including processors, 3DS/authentication providers, tokenisation partners, and card personalisation vendors.
• Establish early-warning monitoring programs for scheme KPIs (fraud, disputes, thresholds) to prevent fee escalation or enforcement actions.
• Lead high-stakes negotiations and external relationship management with Visa and Mastercard, setting the tone for Wise advocacy and commitment tracking.
• Design and maintain a robust control framework, leading audit readiness and managing executive responses for scheme, external, and internal queries.
• Drive continuous improvement by establishing scalable mechanisms, including automated dashboards, standardised templates, and playbooks that reduce manual tasks and single points of failure.

This role will give you the opportunity to

• Choose your path to impact. As a Lead, you’ll take ownership from day one, backed by smart, curious people across Wise while enjoying high levels of autonomy.
• Be extremely hands-on. We don't have far-away leaders at Wise; you’ll be directly leading escalations, shaping controls, and executing solutions yourself.
• Be part of our mission to make money without borders the new normal.