Insufficient number of full-time FinCrime analyst staff
The Great Resignation of the pandemic years reverberated across the financial services industry, and many FIs found themselves short of FinCrime compliance analysts. So, when the slew of Russia-related sanctions hit, FIs simply couldn’t hire fast enough. In fact, many couldn’t hire new analysts at all.
The shortage of full-time analyst staff persists today. There simply are not enough people available to fill job vacancies being advertised by FIs, and those who left their positions have found more fulfilling work elsewhere. What caused their low job satisfaction? Beyond the war, the world has faced consistently growing incident volumes around terror financing, drug trafficking, and other illicit crimes.
The result is that staff-constrained FinCrime compliance teams are massively overwhelmed. In fact, the typical FinCrime analyst now has just 15–30 seconds to review each alert generated by their sanctions screening tools.
Fifteen seconds is too little time for a person to apply a quality evaluation and disposition of a sanctions alert. As a result, analysts who strive to keep pace with alerts rush their work and eventually start to make mistakes. Others simply give up and robotically click through alerts and provide dispositions that are based on inadequate reviews, enabling criminal activities to go unnoticed.
The typical FinCrime analyst now has just 15–30 seconds to review each alert generated by their sanctions screening tools.
Currently, the shortage of full-time employees and the lack of levers needed to handle the high alert volumes are forcing a tradeoff between employee experience (EX) and customer satisfaction (CSAT). For organizations that have not yet embraced modern technologies for FinCrime compliance, operations executives have just two choices in the tradeoff:
Choice A. Force employees to work longer hours to implement new sanctions and handle the larger volume of sanctions alert reviews. This tactic helps to maintain customer service levels and CSAT. Yet, it also leads to high employee burnout and staff turnover – making the compliance operations team even more shorthanded in the medium and longer terms.
Choice B. Maintain positive EX levels by allowing employees to operate in a business-as-usual environment. To achieve this, organizations commonly hire third-party labor at an extremely high cost, making this an unattractive, expensive option. Alternatively, some FIs refuse to pay the higher cost of labor and still maintain business as usual. This tactic helps to slow the exodus of FinCrime compliance analysts from the organization. But, it quickly leads to deteriorated CSAT scores due to longer freeze times on customer accounts caused by the backlog of sanctions alerts. This poses the greatest risk to FIs, as L1 sanctions alert review analysts may not get to the most complex alerts in time to stop FinCrimes from occurring.
