Merchant Acquiring Fraud Analyst (2nd LoD)

Merchant Acquiring Fraud Analyst (2nd LoD)

Location: fully remote in Spain/Poland/Cyprus/Netherlands

About the Role

We are looking for a highly motivated Fraud Analyst (Acquiring side) to join Finom Payments’ Second Line of Defence within the Financial Crime Risk Management Function. This role sits in the Fraud Risk Management team, reports directly to the Fraud Risk Manager, and focuses primarily on the Card Acquiring side of our fintech ecosystem.

In this role, you will be responsible for identifying, analyzing, and mitigating card acquiring fraud risks such as merchant abuse, bust-outs, transaction laundering, friendly fraud, and chargeback spikes. As a Second Line defender, you will monitor, analyze, and challenge the effectiveness of first-line operational fraud controls. You will play a key role in building and continuously improving Finom Payments' fraud risk framework, ensuring fraud rates remain strictly within risk appetite without compromising platform growth or customer experience.

What You Will Be Doing

Acquiring Fraud Risk & Scenario Development

• Analyse internal data sources (alerts, chargebacks, disputes, anomaly reports, ML models) and external trends (card schemes, partners, law enforcement, industry intelligence) to identify emerging fraud risks related to acquiring business.

• Translate observed patterns into well-defined acquiring fraud scenarios, covering areas such as Card-Present and Card-not-present fraud, friendly fraud and dispute abuse, merchant fraud, transaction laundering, enumeration and testing attacks

• Maintain and continuously enrich the Acquiring Fraud Typology Library, aligned with scheme rules, regulatory expectations, and Finom’s risk appetite.

• Work closely with the Fraud Risk Manager, product, engineering, and ML teams to ensure correct translation of acquiring fraud scenarios into rules, thresholds and controls as well as machine-learning features and signals

• Participate in back-testing, validation, and tuning of acquiring fraud controls prior to production release.

• Monitor performance metrics (fraud rate, chargeback ratio, false positives, merchant friction) and propose optimisation actions.

• Act as a Second Line challenger, providing independent oversight of acquiring fraud risk decisions taken in the First Line.

• Support scheme-related topics such as Visa / Mastercard monitoring programs, dispute ratios, and remediation actions.

• Establish proper stakeholder management with product teams, risk management, quality assurance and operations teams

• Develop training materials and guidance for acquiring fraud analysts, dispute teams, and QA.

• Assist in drafting and reviewing system requirements, procedures, and internal policies related to acquiring fraud prevention.

• Actively participate in process improvement initiatives and ad-hoc projects within the Financial Crime Risk Management function.

• Perform other duties as reasonably required to support the operational efficiency and fraud loss prevention of Finom.

Required Experience & Skills

• English – full working proficiency

• 2+ years of experience in merchant risk, acquiring fraud strategy, or payment processor (PSP) risk management within a regulated financial institution or fintech platform.

• Experience with fraud prevention, fraud detection, fraud investigations and fraud mitigations in the financial (Banking, PSP, FinTech) sector

• Solid understanding of acquiring card fraud typologies (Merchant Bust-outs, Transaction Laundering, Card-testing among others), Visa/Mastercard monitoring programs (ECP/VAMP) and rules, and chargeback mechanics .

• Knowledge of the end-to-end payments ecosystem, across both issuing and acquiring rails.

• Experience working with fraud rules, scenarios, or ML-driven controls (end-to-end lifecycle preferred)

• Ability to analyse large datasets; experience with SQL and/or BI tools is a strong advantage

Interpersonal Skills

FINOM strongly rejects the “Compliance says No” mindset.

We are looking for someone who:

• Thinks like a risk partner, not a blocker

• Is comfortable challenging assumptions and proposing pragmatic solutions

• Can explain complex fraud risks in simple, business-friendly language

• Communicates effectively with stakeholders across product, tech, and operations

Interview Process

• Recruiter Interview 

• Team Interview 

• Test Task 

• Final Interview