Increasing Efficiency With IT

I had a chance this week to relate classroom instruction to a real life scenario. I was conducting a Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) compliance audit at a local bank. The BSA requires financial institutions to assist the U.S. government in preventing money laundering. One of the many ways it does this is it requires banks to assign a risk grade (1, 2 or 3) to all of their deposit accounts, where three (3) is considered high risk. All accounts with a risk grade of 3 are required to be monitored to detect suspicious activity. The procedure this bank used to monitor these accounts was to review, on a quarterly basis, all high risk accounts by printing out a 2-month history of information to include average balances, number of times the account was overdrawn, deposit amounts, etc., as well as a two year comparison of these criteria. Keep in mind, the information must be printed and endorsed by the reviewer to provide evidence the accounts are properly reviewed. When I asked to see the two most recent quarterly reviews, the BSA Officer presented me with four folders that were each 4+ inches thick with paperwork. He explained that in the most recent review it took three bank personnel five hours (15 man hours) to complete the review. As an additional note, this is a very new bank that is quickly growing in size and number of accounts so the time and effort to complete the process is only going to increase. My first reaction was, there has to be a better way to do this!
The BSA officer and I discussed how they can purchase software, or customize their existing data processing software, to let the system do the review automatically. Parameters can be set within the software to monitor activity; if a transaction or dollar amount falls outside of the set parameters, it will show up on an exceptions report which the BSA Officer can review on a periodic basis to satisfy compliance requirements. This will make the process considerably more efficient.
This is a basic example relating IT to business processes but it was still interesting to discuss a manual process with a client and how the process can be improved using IT.