Sources and assumptions
Every figure on this site is either sourced below or listed as an assumption. Assumptions are labeled modeled wherever they appear.
Sources
- McKinsey & Company, “The investigator-centered approach to financial crime: Doing what matters,” June 1, 2020
“For most banks, more than 90 percent of transaction-monitoring alerts turn out to be false positives.” “Only one or two transaction-monitoring alerts per hundred is typically acted upon.” “As much as 85 percent of FCC and AML activities remain administrative or nonanalytical.” - FinCEN, Year in Review for Fiscal Year 2025, published May 2026
4.8 million suspicious activity reports filed in FY2025, up from 4.7 million in FY2024. - Federal Reserve, OCC and FDIC, SR 26-2 / OCC Bulletin 2026-13, Revised Guidance on Model Risk Management, April 17, 2026
Supersedes SR 11-7 and SR 21-8. “Generative AI and agentic AI models are novel and rapidly evolving. As such, they are not within the scope of this guidance.” - FinCEN, Proposed rule on AML/CFT program requirements, fact sheet, April 7, 2026
Examiners would consider “whether the bank is employing innovative tools such as artificial intelligence.” Comments closed June 9, 2026; not final as of BDO's tracker dated August 27, 2026. - FinCEN and federal banking agencies, Frequently Asked Questions Regarding Suspicious Activity Reporting, October 9, 2025
“There is no requirement or expectation under the BSA or its implementing regulations for a financial institution to document its decision not to file a SAR.” Structuring SARs are not required absent information that transactions were designed to evade reporting. - FFIEC BSA/AML Examination Manual, Suspicious Activity Reporting
30 days from initial detection, 60 if no suspect is identified. “Initial detection” is not the moment a transaction is highlighted for review. Also: banks “should document SAR decisions, including the specific reason for filing or not filing.” - LexisNexis Risk Solutions, True Cost of Financial Crime Compliance Study, US and Canada, February 2024
$61 billion annual financial crime compliance cost in the US and Canada. - Anthropic, model pricing, checked October 3, 2026
Claude Sonnet 5.5 at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, used to estimate model cost for simulated runs.
Assumptions
| Assumption | Value | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| L1 review time | 30 minutes per alert | Industry estimates run 20 to 60 minutes; no strong public source. A pilot measures it. |
| Loaded analyst cost | $90,000 a year | Salary plus benefits; adjust in the calculator. |
| Productive hours | 1,560 a year | 130 a month after leave, training and meetings. |
| Time saved with the agent | 45% of L1 time | Half the time on alerts that close, a fifth on alerts that escalate, weighted by a 92% close rate (rounded down). |
| Human-to-human disagreement | 3% of closes | Guardrail baseline for missed escalations; replace with your QA data. |
| Demo history volume | About 4,000 alerts a month | A team of about 15 L1 analysts. The demo's weekly history is synthetic. |