Why My First Real‑Time MFS Alert Dashboard Crashed and How I Rebuilt It in 48 Hours
Photo by Mark Chan on Unsplash High‑Stakes Hook It was 02:13 am on a rainy Thursday. The BFIU inbox pinged, a SAR arrived, and the numbers screamed: BDT 4.2 million moved through three Rocket accounts in under five minutes, each just under the BDT 100,000 threshold. My team’s alert list was a sea of noise—1,200 warnings per hour, most of them false. The system timed out, the dashboard froze, and senior management started asking, “Did we miss a structuring ring?” I stared at a blinking red line on a Grafana panel and felt the weight of an audit looming. The Hidden Problem Standard batch‑oriented monitoring works in banks that process a few thousand wires a day. In Bangladesh’s mobile‑financial‑services (MFS) world, transaction velocity is a different beast. bKash, Nagad, Rocket—all push millions of micro‑payments per hour. The BFIU guideline Rule 3.2.1 tells us to watch any series of transactions that cumulatively cross BDT 100,000 within a 24‑hour window, but it does not prescribe ...