Director, Fraud Program Strategy, Governance & Operations

Fraud prevention is critical to protecting clients, strengthening trust, and enabling Schwab's long-term growth. As Director, 1st Line Fraud Strategy, Governance & Operations, you will help shape how Schwab prioritizes, governs, and executes investments across Schwab’s Fraud program which resides in the 1st Line of Defense. In this role, you will be responsible for coordinating fraud prevention, authentication, identity verification, and fraud-risk capabilities across the firm, partnering across the Business, Financial Crimes Risk Management, Technology and Operations teams to deliver end-to end solutions that mitigate fraud risk.

Reporting to the Managing Director, 1st Line Fraud Risk Management, you will drive strategy, governance, prioritization, planning, and operational execution, ensuring leaders can make informed decisions, align investments to strategic objectives, and deliver measurable business outcomes. This is a highly visible leadership role that requires balancing strategic thinking with disciplined execution across a complex, matrixed environment. This role succeeds by translating strategy into action, driving accountability, and ensuring commitments become results. As part of a newly centralized organization, this leader will help establish and mature a strategy, governance, and operations capability that brings greater coordination, clarity, and discipline to work that has historically been distributed across the firm.

SAFE Strategy & Prioritization

• Own prioritization recommendations and strategic investment guidance for program leadership, ensuring investments align to enterprise objectives, risk reduction, client outcomes, and available capacity.
• Lead complex fraud challenges, identify control and process gaps, challenge existing assumptions, and develop enterprise business strategies that reduce fraud risk while balancing client experience, operational efficiency, and business objectives.
• Drive the translation of fraud, risk, or operational challenges into actionable business requirements, strategic roadmaps, and prioritized investment recommendations.
• Partner with business, technology, and risk teams to prioritize and deliver firm-wide capabilities that combat new and emerging fraud threats and schemes.
• Provide strategic input, business priorities, and investment recommendations to planning processes including roadmap alignment, and capacity allocation.

Governance, Accountability & Program Health

• Own program governance and decision-making frameworks, ensuring decisions are timely, transparent, and aligned to strategic objectives.
• Create clear operating routines and connection points across stakeholder groups so priorities, decisions, dependencies, and commitments are understood and managed consistently.
• Drive accountability for program commitments, ensuring priorities, decisions, actions, and investments translate into measurable outcomes.
• Evaluate, monitor, and drive accountability and transparency into program health including effectiveness, execution confidence, and realization of intended value and outcomes.

Operations & Execution

• Define business operating models and decision-making practices that improve decision quality, organizational effectiveness.
• Stand up and mature the centralized strategy and governance capability, defining how work moves from enterprise priorities through decisions, execution, and leadership visibility.
• Escalate unresolved issues and drive leadership decisions that maintain momentum and portfolio performance.
• Propose modifications to policies and practices related to fraud risk management.
• Shape the fraud technology roadmap by evaluating best-in-class tools and AI capabilities.
• Thoughtfully allocate capacity and resources for the portfolio. Work closely with product, platform, and technology teams to make recommendations around buy-versus-build decisions and use of third-party investments that introduce best in class fraud prevention and detection capabilities.

Leadership & Stakeholder Influence

• Build and lead a high-performing organization responsible for program strategy, governance, prioritization, planning, and business operations. Establish a culture of accountability, ownership, disciplined execution, and continuous improvement.
• Build the initial team and establish scalable leadership, talent, and operating practices that support continued growth of the organization over time.
• Develop leaders capable of influencing across organizational boundaries and driving enterprise outcomes.
• Develop executive communications that clearly articulate portfolio priorities, tradeoffs, risks, investment needs, and performance outcomes.
• Collaborate, influence, and drive decision-making by build alignment across Business, Product, Technology, Operations, Finance, and Risk stakeholders.
• Support leadership in developing strategic recommendations, business cases, and portfolio decisions.

Required

• 10+ years of experience in fraud portfolio management, business operations, enterprise transformation, strategy execution, program management, or related disciplines.
• 5+ years of experience leading teams and developing talent in a complex, matrixed organization.
• Demonstrated success building governance and operating models that translate strategy into measurable business outcomes.
• Demonstrated capability to build or mature a centralized enterprise function, bringing structure and accountability to responsibilities previously distributed across multiple teams.
• Experience leading prioritization, dependency management, capacity planning, and cross-functional execution.
• Experience establishing accountability mechanisms and driving execution across multiple stakeholder groups without direct authority.
• Strong analytical, problem-solving, and decision-making capabilities.
• Exceptional executive communication skills, including development of strategic recommendations, executive presentations, and decision-oriented materials.
• Proven ability to influence senior leaders, navigate ambiguity, and deliver results in a fast-paced environment.
• Strong stakeholder management and relationship-building skills.
• Bachelor's degree required. 

Preferred

• Experience supporting technology, product, risk, operations, fraud, cybersecurity, or enterprise transformation organizations.
• Experience with Agile delivery models, portfolio-management methodologies, and strategic planning processes.
• Familiarity with financial services, fraud prevention, authentication, cybersecurity, or risk-management environments.