Why Aithent SAR Manager

Financial institutions in the United States are required to submit detailed reports on transactions that meet specific requirements as specified by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), a unit of the United States Treasury. As the volume of transactions continue to increase, the number of Suspicious Activity Reports, or SARs, required to be filed have also increased and address schemes involving check, card and loan fraud, money-laundering as well as terrorism financing. What was a trickle has turned into a torrent that is tougher to manage for most institutions.

For many, completing a SAR has been a pen-to-paper process. Yet, even as the number of reports has grown, embracing an e-filing option has been resisted, largely because it’s thought to be too costly or too complex.

Aithent SAR Manager™ is a browser-based solution for financial institutions of all types that want to automate and, thus, accelerate the entire SAR process with far less cost or complexity than imagined.

Aithent SAR Manager’s intuitive dashboard accelerates process, improves accuracy

Aithent SAR Manager is a highly intuitive, automated service that provides essential case management, eliminates errors and provides instant acknowledgement and a documented audit trail of a filing to make regulatory compliance certain.

It lets a financial institution’s compliance group aggregate, organize and analyze all the related case information and items, including check images, transaction records, the names of all parties and investigators’ notes, ensuring regulators will understand why the SAR was submitted.

Available on a no-contract subscription basis, an institution can access the capabilities of Aithent SAR Manager for a low monthly fee of $100. The service is set to be available October 1, 2010. Those who sign-up by September 30, 2010 can realize a 25 percent savings off the monthly subscription for the first six months of service. Organizations that prefer to pre-pay 12 months of service can realize further savings. A single annual payment for Aithent SAR Manager is $1,000.

As important as reducing the cost to use highly manual paper-based methods and making a long-term commitment to other e-filing approaches, Aithent SAR Manager cuts time and needed resources. Comparisons between handling the process with a paper method and Aithent SAR Manager can yield a 40 percent reduction in time to prepare and submit the report. It can free up personnel to shift their roles to customer-facing activities.

Aithent SAR Manager stores your data in encrypted form at a secure hosting facility with 24/7-support that conforms to Statement of Auditing Standards (SAS) 70. Only you have access to this data. Once a SAR is submitted to FinCEN, the report is maintained in a secure manner. If you need to re-file or refer to a previously filed SAR, you can do so easily.

By providing the storage and retrieval of a SAR and related incident information for five years, the service gives an institution the ability to sort through and analyze SAR data by geography, financial crime category and customer. This Aithent SAR Manager feature allows for a deeper understanding of the risk associated with suspicious activities, especially those that relate to the Bank Secrecy Act.