Why Most BD Banks Miss Sanctions Hits: The Audit‑Night Tale That Changed My Screening Playbook
AI-generated illustration Bangladesh, 02:17 am. My phone buzzed. An email from BFIU: ‘Immediate audit – 150 flagged transactions pending review’ . My team’s sanctions screen had just exploded with false positives – 1,200 alerts for a $5 million daily volume. The regulator was breathing down our necks, senior management was threatening budget cuts, and I could hear the coffee machine sputtering in the background. I was staring at a dashboard that looked like a fireworks show. That night, I realized we’d built the wrong kind of filter. The Hidden Problem Behind the Noise Most banks in Bangladesh start with a “plug‑and‑play” sanctions list from the UN and OFAC, then sprinkle a few country‑code checks. It sounds sensible until you factor in three local quirks: Bangladeshi Mobile Financial Services (MFS) push billions through BDT 100,000 thresholds, but the BFIU only requires detailed SARs for transactions above BDT 5 million . Names are often transliterated from Bangla to Latin script, pr...