BAM+ Tips & Tricks: If You Can Find It, You Can Tag It
BAM+ Tips from a Banker’s Toolbox Product Manager
As a product manager, I get to work with our customers and several internal teams to create new BSA/AML management tools, and then the fun begins as I watch our customers find innovative ways to maximize their usage of each tool.
As an example, we introduced Account Tags to BAM+ a few years ago. This feature offered financial institutions the means to document account attributes not otherwise noted for use in report filtering. At installation, users receive a ‘starter’ set including tags to document Bulk Cash Shipment activity, MSBs and Private ATMs, Remote Deposit Capture, PEPS, and Non-Resident Aliens to name a few, as well as more standard Employee, Officer and Director designations. Our customers then have the ability to create an unlimited number of institution-specific tags based on their unique needs. Once a tag exists, our Support group can help financial institutions ‘mass tag’ groups of accounts or modify feeds to “auto-tag” accounts that meet specific criteria.
The release of BAM+ in 2013 took the Account Tag functionality to a whole new level, as our customers leverage tags to create User Defined Groups, fine-tuning the wide array of BSA/AML Scenarios at their disposal. This allows the financial institution to set targeted parameters to better highlight outliers, drastically reducing the time-intensive false-positive “noise.” Less noise means more time for quality investigations.
Since the release of Account Tags, we’ve seen our customers identify various types of businesses that don’t have their own NAICS code, such as adult entertainment and marijuana-related businesses, to fine-tune their MSB categorizations, to identify student accounts to be monitored for known patterns of terrorist financing, and to document CTR exempt accounts. Tags have even been used to document scheduled and completed CDD/EDD review dates.
Thinking further outside the box… Customers can try using tags to relate seemingly “unrelated” account groups – accounts that do not share common primary owners or signers, but may share beneficial owners, or other relationships you’ve become privy to. If you can find it, you can tag it!
Currently, institutions that use 3-4 character tags can add 20-25 individual tags to any given account. Now that we’ve seen some of the more innovative usages of account tags, we will be increasing that field length to allow even more options. We will also be adding a column to the Alert and Case list views so that you can more easily identify hits against specific user defined groups. Stay tuned for more updates to BAM+!
If you can tag it, you can not only enhance your monitoring capabilities, but you can do so more efficiently. Questions about how it all works? Contact us. We’re here to help!
