BSA Officers: How to Mitigate Risks When Hiring a Staffing Firm

The demand for AML/BSA personnel is higher than ever before. And while demand is at an all-time high, the supply of smart, well-trained people is deficient. This simple issue is crippling banks’ ability to stay current with their day-to-day operations.

When demand is high and supply is low, banks typically go outside their institution and look for AML/BSA contractors. However, BSA Officers at every institution understand that contract resources come with significant risks. Despite a bank’s best efforts to conduct a thorough background check and interview, questions always remain about the contractors’ ability to execute. More troubling still, you never know who you are working with until after the statement of work is signed.

So before you sign on the dotted line with an AML/BSA staffing firm, ask yourself the following questions:

• Does the staffing firm actually know their contractors?
• Does the staffing firm actually employ their contractors or are they merely sending you resumes?
• Do they know what the contractor’s work has been like for the previous year?
• Can they send you client references on demand?
• Will they guarantee the quality of the work they provide?
• Does the staffing firm onboard, train, and perform a background check themselves?
• Does the staffing firm help monitor the quality of the work on a daily basis and give detailed reports on progress?
• Will the staffing firm offer tightly-wound service level agreements for production and quality standards?

The answer to all of these should be yes, but the reality is that most staffing firms do not know the contractors they are recommending. They are merely managing resumes, and leaving you to handle the outcomes. What’s more, most staffing firms accept projects that they are not equipped to handle, causing them to quickly “hire” people they do not know or have not thoroughly vetted.

That is not the case with AML RightSource. We employ all of our 180 financial crime analysts, investigators, and subject matter experts. We know our people and can send sample work product for each employee. We guarantee our work and insist that banks only pay for work that meets the bank’s quality standards. We do our own onboarding and training to make sure that the people you receive are professional and excellent at their craft. We provide production and quality scoring metrics to ensure the product you receive is excellent every time.

We do all of this at a reasonable cost, without the unnecessary overhead and endless fees that you have become accustomed to when dealing with staffing augmentation vendors. In other words, we actually consider the bank’s bottom line, not just our own.

Does your staffing firm do this? We are guessing not. Sound too good to be true? Not really, just ask our clients.