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AML/CFT

Texan Bank | Reducing False Positives With BAM+

The Challenge: Too Many Alerts, Too Little Time

“The number of false positives were unreal,” said Danielle Mitchell, Senior Vice President and BSA & Compliance Officer at Texan Bank. She was referring to the bank’s previous BSA software automation. The system was returning too many alerts, most of which were not meaningful. Danielle was wasting time clearing the same alerts on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. The process was inefficient and auditors began to notice.

Beyond the false positives, the reporting in the old system was a challenge. “The reports were terrible,” Danielle said. There was no easy way to track the investigation trail of an alert. The CTR/SAR filing functions were also inadequate, causing a lot of manual work on Danielle’s end. “It was a nightmare,” she said. Something had to change.

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We were able to reduce our false positives by 70%, which led to improved exam results.
Danielle Mitchell, Texan Bank

The Solution: On-Site Training and Continuous Support from Advisory Services

After much discussion with her auditor in 2015, Danielle knew she needed a better tool. Determined to impress them the following year, she began researching other solutions. That’s when Texan Bank introduced BAM+ from Abrigo. In choosing BAM+, Danielle had three overall criteria:

    1. Fewer false positives. To be more effective in her role, Danielle needed to spend less time backtracking, doing manual work and having to go outside the system to track down information. These inefficiencies were a waste of time, which is something no busy BSA Officer can afford.
    2. Custom scenarios. The ability to figure out if a certain dollar amount was working for their purposes was key, Danielle noted.  With BAM+, she could gauge whether they were getting too many alerts or not enough. When she needs a change, the system picked it up the next day, giving her team more meaningful alerts.
    3. Electronic SAR/CTR filing. In the previous system, the information needed to file SARs and CTRs was in bits and pieces. In BAM+, the information was aggregated and pre-filled, eliminating the need to follow up with tellers.

With Texan Bank being a very compliance-oriented bank, the decision to switch to BAM+ was easy. Danielle felt confident that BAM+ would solve all of her team’s problems and prevent them from getting written up by examiners.

Now, Danielle reports that BAM+ has made her job easier. Having all of the information in one place has been one of the biggest benefits. She’s saving time and feeling far more organized both when examiners come and in her day-to-day responsibilities.

 

The Result: A Confident BSA Officer and Impressed Regulators

After the implementation of BAM+ in 2015, the 2016
exam was Texan Bank’s time to shine. This was the first year that Danielle felt truly prepared for examiners.
When they asked to see something specific, all she had
to do was run a report. “It’s been great,” Danielle said. “I
was super excited.”

The regulators were also very pleased. Danielle was able to show the regulator her entire audit log related to each alert. Through the reporting function, she was able to display cases, SARs, where an alert came from, the dates, whether they filed on time and more. She no longer needed to remember the story behind each SAR.

For Texan Bank, BAM+ was able to address two major
issues that many BSA compliance departments face: too many false positives and negative exam results. “The whole system has just been fantastic,” Danielle said. At Abrigo, “fantastic” is what we aim for. If only that were an official rating on a BSA exam!

Having all of the pieces, alerts, cases, SARs, CTRs, scenarios, in one place saves you time.
Danielle Mitchell, Texan Bank