The US Department of Justice and bank regulators consider anti-money laundering (AML) enforcement one of their top priorities. In recent years, financial institutions have incurred hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties for failing to adequately prevent bad actors from disguising illegally obtained funds as legitimate income.

One leading US bank knew it needed to improve its AML controls to ensure regulatory compliance and to better manage risk. The bank’s first-level review process to identify suspicious entities and activities met compliance standards. However, the bank was concerned that it lacked robust quality assurance for the AML control processes, as evidenced by the low-quality measures and a backlog of 30,000 cases that needed a secondary review. Without a solid AML quality assurance process, the bank risked violating critical regulatory requirements.