Sara Wahba

• Responsible for the management and oversight of the high-risk client population across all segments in Africa and the Middle East, keeping abreast of best practices across the industry and providing suggestions on how the current processes can be enhanced to ensure adherence to current market practices.

Main responsibilities

• Work with stakeholders from the country compliance teams and business functions across corporate and retail segments to support escalations of high-risk clients under the KYC process.
• Oversee the execution of the controls implemented on sensitive clients by the business and ensure any concerns are addressed in a timely manner.
• Update dashboards and update reports for the annual reporting of the sensitive client population along with the results of the controls implemented to regional and group leadership teams to ensure visibility.
• Coordinate the implementation of the annual high-risk client review with Country and Regional CEOs to provide subject matter expertise on subject cases.
• Develop and deliver focused training to FLOD and Compliance on performing enhanced due diligence on Very high risk / sensitive relationships.
• Proactive engage with stakeholders to identify opportunities to effectively manage financial crime risk by leveraging data analytics.
• Socialize case studies and communicate best practices to all business and compliance stakeholders to effectively manage fraud risk.

Key achievements

• Worked with the business to utilize data analytics to evaluate the revenue vs cost of the retaining the sensitive client population resulting in a 10% reduction in portfolio and an estimated savings of $1 Million.
• Trained 150 members of the regional compliance population on data analytics tools which eliminated several manual reporting increasing the departments efficiency by 30%.

• Led the advisory team responsible for guiding business in the execution of due diligence processes and controls, interpreting policies, guidelines, and governance programs covering areas related to AML, Sanctions and ABC.

Main responsibilities

• Review and respond to due diligence / AML queries (including sanctions nexus, adverse media, PEPs, and positive/true matches on the bank’s internal watch lists and AML questionnaires provided by correspondent banking clients.
• Accountable for the review of new-to-bank (NTB) high-risk clients' KYC records for the Corporate and Institutional Banking segment ensuring that cases are prioritized and managed effectively in line with the agreed processes and service level agreements while adequately documenting a comprehensive summary of the risks introduced by a client and providing recommendations to mitigate the risks.
• Develop and deliver focused training to FLOD and Businesses on performing customer due diligence.

Key achievements

• Developed and implemented an automated cross-functional advisory tool that was implemented across all SCB geographies.
• Developed and delivered a financial crime focused training program for the first line of defense and business staff as the designated AME learning academy project manager.
• Acted as Cyber security Liaison to educate and train the business functions on technical knowledge needed when dealing with clients to avoid information security breaches.
• Participated in AID (Automation, Innovation, and digitization) task force designed to identify areas of improvement and redesign existing processes, automating reports through the creation of dashboards to ensure data accuracy.

• Enhanced compliance procedures by conducting risk assessments and implementing updated policies.

Main responsibilities

• Coordinated the communication of key changes (to laws, rules, regulations) to region/country, in coordination with group communications.
• Worked closely with the relevant risk committees to revise policies/processes/DOIs to address financial crime risks, aligning with relevant regulatory requirements.
• Provided governance and oversight over the implementation of Financial Crime Compliance framework related policies and procedures in Oman to ensure compliance with the group and local regulations.
• Managed FCC-owned processes under the Group's Risk Management Framework, including implementation and roll-out of relevant processes and DOIs.
• Maintain oversight of risk-mitigating action plans for all regulatory breaches.
• Conducted regulatory gap analysis, policy creation and implementation

• Govern HUB's activities to ensure quality & TATs are met for all banking processes and ensure exceptions and process gaps are addressed through regular service review calls.

Main responsibilities

• Govern HUB’s activities to ensure quality & TATs are met for all banking processes and ensure exceptions and process gaps are addressed through regular service review calls.
• Co-ordination of Off-boarding activities and client static data alignment across all systems.
• Liaising with the Data Quality Management team to manage Client data exception