Card Risk Strategy Specialist

Role Overview

This is a hands-on, full-cycle role that owns the whole fraud control loop: investigate, analyze, set up rules, monitor, and improve. You will work tickets daily, turn what you find into data-backed fraud rules and strategies, monitor how they perform, and keep refining them. Each stage feeds the next.

You will own the card risk control strategy, from set-up through ongoing performance, and be accountable for the fraud rate and the interception rate.

Key Responsibilities

1. Investigation

Handle card risk tickets daily: review rule-triggered alerts, investigate suspicious accounts and transactions, and decide on block, decline, step-up, or card-lifecycle actions within SLA

Investigate fraud typologies: account takeover, card testing, BIN attacks, merchant collusion, friendly fraud, and first-party abuse

Assess merchant and transaction risk by MCC risk type, including high-risk merchants and non-card payment flows

Manage disputes and chargebacks end to end under Visa/Mastercard rules: evidence, representation, pre-arbitration, and arbitration

2. Data Analysis

Turn investigation findings into patterns: analyze ticket, alert, and transaction data to identify fraud trends, attack vectors, and coverage gaps

Measure false positives against loss to judge whether existing rules are effective

3. Rule Set-up

Design and set up fraud rules, velocity limits, and strategies based on the analysis

Make sure rule triggers and decisions stay compliant; escalate linked AML/sanctions concerns to Compliance

4. Rule Monitoring

Continuously monitor alert and ticket data after rules go live

Track and report KPIs: fraud loss rate (bps), chargeback ratio, approval rate, alert handling time, recovery rate

Keep the programme within scheme monitoring thresholds (e.g. VAMP, ECM/EFM) and support scheme and partner audits

5. Rule Improvement

Adjust, retire, and add rules in response to monitoring results, balancing fraud loss against false positives and approval rate

Feed fraud trends back to Product and Engineering to improve onboarding, 3DS, and authorisation controls

Requirements

3+ years in card fraud strategy or payments risk at an issuer, EMI, neobank, PSP, or card programme manager

Proven hands-on experience building and tuning fraud rules and strategies, not only working tickets

Hands-on knowledge of Visa and/or Mastercard dispute rules, reason codes, and chargeback timelines

Experience with MCC-based risk, high-risk merchants, and non-card payments

Strong data skills: SQL and Excel/Sheets to pull, slice, and explain fraud trends

Fluent English; Mandarin or other European languages are a plus

Nice to Have

Crypto-linked or prepaid/debit card programme experience, including crypto-to-fiat conversion at authorisation

Card risk control experience across multiple countries/regions

Experience launching a card programme in a new market or with a new BIN sponsor

Scheme monitoring programme remediation experience

Python or BI tooling (Looker, Tableau, Metabase)

Certifications: CFE, ACAMS, or equivalent