That's how Hatice, AML Team Lead in Compliance at wamo, describes the moment she realized she'd found her field — spotting a transaction that didn't match a customer's profile, pulling the thread, figuring out what was really going on. As a kid, she wanted to be a police officer. Years later, in a job she'd more or less landed in by accident, that same instinct woke back up.
From Sales Targets to Detective Work
Before Malta, before compliance, Hatice worked inside sales in Turkey — chasing a new target every month, hitting it every time, and slowly wearing herself down in the process. When she joined wamo, she started in customer support, not compliance. It was her manager who first spotted the fit: her knowledge level was too advanced for the role, and operations might suit her better. It did. Reviewing transactions, tracing where money moved, noticing what didn't add up — that was the job that clicked.
She's since enrolled in diploma programs to build on it, and says the sales instinct never fully left. "If a company has a product that needs selling and I'm talking to someone outside of work, I'll still ask which POS system they're using and pass their details to the sales team. That's not part of my job description, but I can't help it."
It turns out that background is an asset, not a detour. Compliance officers who start in compliance and nowhere else, she says, tend to see a suspicious transaction and go straight to freezing the account. Sales experience adds a second lens: "Unless there's a serious red flag, I try not to lose that customer. I look at it through a sales lens first."
Trust Is the Whole Job
Hatice didn't move to Malta for work — her spouse relocated and she followed. Three months without a job was already too long for someone who loves working, so she started looking, and that's how she crossed paths with wamo's founder, Yankı. Since he didn't know her yet, she started in customer support and built trust from there.
"I think the biggest driver of that whole shift was really Yankı's trust in me."
That theme — being trusted before you've fully proven yourself, and then trying not to waste it — runs through how she talks about her whole career at wamo. It's also, in her telling, the real engine behind her move into leadership. She credits her own manager with shaping how she leads now, specifically with softening her naturally blunt edges. "I've noticed myself reacting differently now than I used to."
The Department That Says No (With Reasons)
"We're not just a department that says no — that's a bit of a misconception. Yes, there are moments we have to say no, but what matters is that there's a real reason behind it, and that we can show it to our team."
Her test for her own team is simple: no decision runs on gut feeling alone. If someone flags a suspicion, she asks them to articulate it. Acting on instinct alone, she says, is how you end up losing valuable customers.
She's also thinking ahead to who takes over her current role. It's not a handoff she'll make lightly. Whoever steps in needs to be checking everything the way she does, fully, before she'll trust them with it. In the meantime, she's coaching the people she believes will get there.
AI Won't Make the Call for You
AI is the other force reshaping Hatice's day-to-day. Not just her own workflow, but what she can realistically ask an entire team to adopt, given compliance's regulatory constraints and the real cost of running these tools at scale.
Her view on where it fits is settled: "AI tools make the work easier — maybe instead of hiring 10 people, you work with 5 — but at the end of the day, there still needs to be a human making the final call." She's seen it get things wrong: misread an earlier sentence, hand back bad data, and if you act on that without checking, the decision is wrong too. New EU regulation is coming for exactly this reason, and she expects the loose, "everyone uses it their own way" approach to give way to real guidelines.
Her advice for anyone nervous about their field changing this fast is clear: don't stay still. "A lot of jobs, as they used to be defined, don't really exist in the same form anymore. What really moves a person forward is that willingness to stay open." You can choose to stay where you are, she adds — that's a legitimate choice — but you have to be honest with yourself about whether you'll actually be at peace with it.
Not What People Expect
Ask Hatice what people get wrong about her, and she laughs a little. "I think people assume I'm a bit tough, harsh, maybe because of Compliance, or maybe I came across that way even before Compliance. But outside of work I'm nothing like that. I'm actually quite adaptable and easygoing in most things."
It's a reaction she hears often enough to find funny: "You come across as tough from the outside, but once we got to know you, it turned out to be nothing like that."
