Customer Operations Lead (f/m/d)

ABOUT LEMON.MARKETS 🍋 We enable anyone to be an investor. Our mission is to grow investing opportunities for all European customers and businesses. By empowering FinTechs, banks, and wealth managers to offer investment products, we help create financial well-being for their customers. lemon.markets is a Brokerage-as-a-Service platform: simple digital access to capital markets through a single API. Our API-first infrastructure abstracts brokerage complexity with a well-documented API, a self-service customer operations portal, and a clear regulatory framework, so partners can launch customer-centric, compliant products in weeks, not months. As part of the dwpbank Group, we share a clear goal: making investing in capital markets more accessible. By combining dwpbank’s long-standing expertise and stability with lemon.markets http://lemon.markets’ technology-first mindset and speed, we are building a modern, modular securities services ecosystem. Together, we offer faster time-to-market, modular services, and a modern customer experience that helps financial service providers stay competitive and respond more flexibly in a changing market. Your Mission You will ensure lemon.markets delivers a fast, reliable, and compliant customer lifecycle so our partners can launch and scale investment products with confidence. Sitting in the 1st Line of Defense (1LoD), you’ll lead Customer Ops, KYC Ops, and AFC Ops and make sure day-to-day operations run smoothly while meeting regulatory expectations. You’ll report to our Head of Operations and work closely with Banking Ops and Securities Ops, plus key stakeholders in our Customer Lifecycle domain (Product & Engineering) and our 2nd Line of Defense (Compliance/Risk). Over the first months, your focus will be to bring a fresh, data-driven perspective, quickly diagnosing the biggest drivers of volume, risk, and customer pain. You’ll build a clear prioritization roadmap and execute it. Your main mission is to turn the department into a highly automated machine by redesigning workflows and automating as much as possible (while keeping compliance guardrails intact). In this role you will: - Develop and lead a team of FTEs and working students across Customer Ops, KYC Ops, and AFC Ops, setting clear expectations, coaching, and building a high-ownership culture. - Run and improve day-to-day performance across the lifecycle by steering SLAs, backlogs, cycle times, quality, and rework, ensuring customers and partners get predictable, reliable outcomes. - Establish an operating system for the area (daily/weekly reviews, capacity planning, queue/skill management) that makes priorities, bottlenecks, and decisions transparent. - Own and evolve KYC operations (onboarding, verification, document checks, remediation, periodic reviews where relevant) with strong QA standards, sampling, and root-cause work to reduce KYC aging and risk. - Own AFC case & alert operations including evidence collection, escalation logic, and audit trails to ensure defensible decisions and strong audit readiness. - Partner with Product, Engineering, and 2LoD to translate regulatory and operational needs into scalable workflows, permissions, logging, and controls and ensure every change is operationally ready (SOPs, training, rollout/support). - Lead automation initiatives across the whole Ops function by eliminating manual work through workflow automation, decision engines, etc. driving efficiency, consistency, and faster turnaround times while reducing operational risk. - Own vendor management and communication, ensuring external partners/tools meet our requirements for performance, scalability, and auditability. You’ll be successful in this role if you: - Bring multi-year operations experience in a regulated environment (FinTech/Banking) having hands-on expertise across Customer Service Ops, KYC Ops, and AFC Ops. Brokerage experience is a strong plus. - Have proven people leadership experience (coaching, performance management, h...