8 Years of STR Filing: How I Brought Automation to a Bangladeshi Fintech with Python
Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash I still remember the day our team was slammed with over 10,000 suspicious transaction reports (STRs) to file with the Bangladesh Financial Intelligence Unit (BFIU) in a single week. It was chaos. Our manual process, which involved filling out templates and submitting them individually, was on the verge of collapse. We had to automate, and fast. The Hidden Problem In Bangladesh, the BFIU requires financial institutions to report suspicious transactions exceeding BDT 100,000. But with millions of transactions happening daily through mobile financial services (MFS) like bKash and Nagad, manual reporting just isn't scalable. Standard approaches to automation often fall short due to the complexity of our local regulatory landscape and the nuances of MFS transactions. The Technical Challenge To automate STR filing, we needed a system that could accurately identify suspicious transactions, generate reports in the required format, and submit them to the B...