A bank’s compliance department needed a better way to deal with high-risk activity

If the word “compliance” has already put you to sleep, let’s try these: “global money laundering”, “Chinese wall”, and “drug cartel”

A small international bank found itself under intense scrutiny due to the high-risk financial activities of its customers. The number of annual Suspicious Activity Reports (a.k.a. SARs, the most important reports of potentially illegal activity) had risen from a couple dozen to a couple thousand. These SARs landed in the lap of the AML Compliance department, which simply couldn’t keep working as it always had. AML Compliance asked my team to create a small database, and we quickly saw that they could use a much more robust product. We called it the Systematic New Approach to Processing SARs and Exceptions — SyNAPSE — and it cut SAR handling time by 75%.

User Story 1: An AML Compliance associate manually matches records across two separate databases and logs the results in a spreadsheet

(See details and SyNAPSE results)

• Search the SAR database and identify SARs that are newly filed, opening each in a new browser tab
• Search the customer database to find any bank customers listed on each SAR (See details and SyNAPSE results)
• Record matched customers in a temporary document for inclusion in the tracking spreadsheet
• Copy all of the information from the SAR into the spreadsheet, one item at a time
• Copy all of the information on each matched customer into the spreadsheet, one item at a time

User Story 2: The AML Compliance manager pushes and tracks the SAR through the resolution process

(See details and SyNAPSE results)

• Copy the information from the spreadsheet into a PowerPoint template to make a report for the consensus meeting
• Update the spreadsheet with results of the consensus meeting
• Review the spreadsheet periodically to find SARs that have spent too much time getting to a consensus so that they can be escalated
• Request that the customer’s accounts be closed and follow up on the request, keeping the spreadsheet up to date on the status of each account
• Copy the account closure status from the spreadsheet into a PowerPoint template to make a separate report for the consensus meeting
• Review the spreadsheet periodically to find accounts that have spent too much time being closed so that the issue can be escalated

SyNAPSE automates, redesigns, and streamlines most of this work, reducing time required by 75%

Our product combines extracts from two client databases, provides intuitive interfaces for layering new information on top of those records, and automatically creates several of the client’s most often-generated reports. This eliminates most of the department’s manual effort, particularly for customer matching and report generation. Senior management has seen an improvement in the consistency of the AML Compliance department’s results. SyNAPSE also creates detailed trend data that was not previously available, allowing for a much more nuanced understanding of the bank’s high-risk activities and of the department’s work.