Risk, Fraud & Compliance

A Fraud Analyst investigates suspicious transactions, accounts, or behaviours to identify and prevent fraudulent activity. In financial services, this involves reviewing flagged alerts from automated detection systems, conducting case investigations, gathering evidence, making accept/decline decisions, and reporting confirmed fraud in line with regulatory obligations. Analysts must balance fraud prevention with customer experience — incorrectly flagging legitimate transactions has real costs for both businesses and customers. Modern fraud analysis increasingly involves data-led detection. Analysts are expected to understand how fraud detection models work, identify patterns in transaction data, and contribute to the tuning of rules and thresholds. Specialist areas within fraud include account takeover, authorised push payment (APP) fraud, identity fraud, first-party fraud, and insider threat. Communication and investigation skills are as important as technical ones — fraud analysts frequently liaise with law enforcement, other banks, and regulatory bodies.

A Risk Analyst identifies, assesses, and helps mitigate financial, operational, or regulatory risks within an organisation. Day-to-day work involves building risk models, analysing data to spot patterns or exposures, producing risk reports for senior stakeholders, and recommending controls or process changes. Risk Analysts work closely with compliance, finance, and operations teams to ensure the business operates within its risk appetite. The role sits at the intersection of data analysis, business understanding, and regulatory awareness. In financial services, analysts may focus on credit, market, or liquidity risk; in other sectors the focus shifts to operational or enterprise-wide risk. Strong Excel and data skills are essential, and proficiency in tools like Python, SQL, or risk management platforms (e.g. Archer, MetricStream) is increasingly expected.

A Compliance professional ensures that an organisation operates within the legal, regulatory, and ethical boundaries that govern its industry. In financial services, this means monitoring adherence to FCA rules, managing regulatory change, conducting compliance monitoring reviews, and advising the business on policies covering areas such as anti-money laundering (AML), market abuse, data protection, and consumer duty. In other sectors, compliance may cover health and safety, environmental regulation, data privacy (GDPR), or sector-specific licensing requirements. Compliance professionals work closely with legal, risk, and senior management teams. The role involves a mix of policy development, training, monitoring, reporting to regulators, and managing investigations or breaches. Strong written communication, attention to detail, and the ability to translate complex regulatory requirements into practical business guidance are core skills.

An AML (Anti-Money Laundering) Analyst works to detect, investigate, and report suspicious financial activity that may indicate money laundering, terrorist financing, or other financial crime. Day-to-day work involves reviewing transaction monitoring alerts generated by automated systems, conducting customer due diligence (CDD) and enhanced due diligence (EDD) on higher-risk clients, preparing Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) for submission to the National Crime Agency (NCA), and maintaining accurate records in line with the Money Laundering Regulations 2017. AML Analysts work closely with compliance, legal, and front-line relationship teams, and operate within a tightly regulated environment where accuracy and sound judgement are essential. The role exists across a wide range of organisations — retail banks, investment firms, payment institutions, crypto exchanges, and professional services firms including law firms and accountancies. Entry-level positions typically focus on first-line transaction monitoring alert review, progressing to more complex investigations and customer risk assessments. Strong attention to detail, the ability to analyse patterns across large volumes of data, and clear written communication for SAR preparation are the core competencies employers assess at interview.

A GRC (Governance, Risk, and Compliance) Analyst supports an organisation's framework for managing risk, meeting regulatory obligations, and ensuring that internal controls are designed and operating effectively. Day-to-day work involves maintaining risk registers, conducting control assessments, supporting internal and external audits, tracking regulatory changes, and preparing management reporting on the organisation's risk and compliance posture. GRC Analysts typically work across the business, engaging with teams in operations, IT, finance, and legal to understand risk exposures and gather evidence of control effectiveness. The role bridges governance structures — policies, frameworks, and committee reporting — with the practical testing and monitoring of controls. In technology-heavy organisations, GRC Analysts often work closely with information security teams, making this one of the roles where cyber and compliance skills genuinely intersect. Entry-level positions focus on documentation, control evidence gathering, and maintaining GRC platforms such as Archer, ServiceNow GRC, or MetricStream. Progression leads toward risk management, audit, or specialist compliance roles, and the GRC framework underpins career paths in financial services, technology, healthcare, and the public sector.

A RegTech Analyst works at the intersection of regulatory compliance and technology, helping organisations implement and manage software solutions that automate, streamline, or enhance their compliance processes. Day-to-day work involves analysing regulatory requirements and mapping them to technology capabilities, supporting the evaluation and onboarding of RegTech tools, maintaining regulatory change management processes, and working with compliance, IT, and data teams to ensure technology solutions meet both legal requirements and business needs. The role requires a combination of compliance knowledge, analytical thinking, and comfort with technology platforms — making it one of the most forward-looking entry points in the compliance market. RegTech Analyst roles exist in two main contexts: within regulated firms (banks, insurers, payment institutions) who are implementing RegTech solutions to improve their compliance operations, and within RegTech vendors who need analysts to support product development, client implementation, and regulatory mapping. Both offer strong career foundations, with vendor roles typically providing faster exposure to a variety of regulatory problems and client environments. The UK is one of the world's leading RegTech hubs, supported by the FCA's Innovation Hub and Regulatory Sandbox, which creates a dynamic job market for early-career professionals in this space.

A Junior Actuary applies statistical and mathematical techniques to assess financial risk and uncertainty, typically within insurance, pensions, investment management, or financial services. Day-to-day work involves building and running actuarial models, analysing large datasets, preparing reports for senior actuaries and management, supporting reserving calculations, and contributing to pricing or capital modelling projects. Junior Actuaries work under the supervision of qualified actuaries and are expected to be progressing through the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) examinations throughout their early career. The role demands strong mathematical and statistical ability combined with commercial awareness and clear communication skills — actuaries must be able to explain complex probabilistic analysis to non-technical stakeholders including boards and regulators. In the UK, actuarial roles are most concentrated in the London market (Lloyd's of London, general and life insurance), Edinburgh (life and pensions), and the major consulting firms. Demand is growing in newer areas including cyber insurance, climate risk, and data science applications, meaning the discipline is evolving well beyond its traditional insurance heartland.

An AI Quality / Testing Analyst designs and executes the evaluation processes that ensure AI systems — particularly those using large language models or machine learning models — behave reliably, safely, and as intended before and after deployment. Day-to-day work involves writing test cases that probe AI system behaviour across a wide range of inputs including edge cases and adversarial examples, running structured evaluations to measure output quality against defined criteria, documenting failure modes and unexpected behaviours, collaborating with prompt engineers and ML engineers to investigate root causes, and maintaining evaluation datasets and benchmarks. The role requires a combination of systematic QA discipline, curiosity about AI system behaviour, and enough technical literacy to understand what is being tested and why it might fail. AI Quality Testing is one of the newest specialisms in the technology sector, emerging from the realisation that conventional software testing methods — which verify deterministic outputs — are insufficient for AI systems whose outputs are probabilistic, context-dependent, and difficult to fully specify in advance. Entry-level positions typically focus on test case design, manual evaluation, and maintaining test sets, with progression toward automated evaluation frameworks, red-teaming, and evaluation methodology ownership. The role exists primarily at AI companies, technology firms with significant AI deployments, financial services organisations using ML in regulated decision-making, and consulting firms advising on AI governance.

An ESG Analyst researches and evaluates companies' environmental, social, and governance performance to support investment decision-making, stewardship activities, or corporate ESG strategy. In an investor-facing context, the role involves assessing companies against ESG criteria, engaging with company management on ESG practices, contributing to portfolio-level ESG reporting, and supporting the integration of ESG factors into investment analysis. In a corporate context, the role involves monitoring peer ESG performance, responding to investor ESG queries, managing relationships with ESG ratings agencies, and supporting the development and disclosure of the organisation's ESG strategy. Day-to-day work involves data gathering from ESG databases and company disclosures, quantitative analysis of ESG metrics, writing research notes or disclosure responses, and staying current with evolving regulatory requirements and investor expectations. ESG Analyst roles exist primarily in asset management, investment banking, pension funds, ESG ratings agencies, and at large listed companies managing their own ESG function. The profession has grown dramatically since 2020 as ESG integration moved from a niche practice to a mainstream expectation among institutional investors. The UK is one of the world's leading ESG investment markets, driven by the FCA's ESG disclosure requirements for asset managers, the pension fund trustee duties under the Pension Schemes Act, and the TCFD mandatory reporting regime. Analysts who combine investment analysis skills with deep ESG framework knowledge are among the most sought-after professionals in the asset management sector.