Why My MFS Alert Threshold Blew Up the Budget – A Real‑World Post‑Mortem
AI-generated illustration It was 02:17 AM on a rainy Dhaka night. My phone buzzed with a BFIU alert: 12,000 transactions flagged under the BDT 100,000 threshold for mobile money agents. The system had just dumped an extra 1.3 million BDT into the daily alert queue. My inbox filled with SAR drafts, senior managers pinged me, and the compliance dashboard turned bright red. I realized the threshold we’d set two years ago was bleeding us dry. The Hidden Problem: Why “One‑Size‑Fits‑All” Thresholds Don’t Work in Bangladesh Most MFS providers start with the regulator‑mandated BDT 100,000 daily volume trigger. Easy to implement. Easy to audit. But the reality on the ground is messier than the rulebook. Agent banking clusters in Mirpur and Gulshan push 30 % of daily volume. Rural kiosks see spikes only during harvest festivals. Seasonal cash‑in flows from remittances spike at Eid. When you treat all agents the same, you end up with two beasts: A flood of false positives that drown genuine SAR...