How BHG Financial Files SARs 5x Faster with Hummingbird

Key Takeaways

• BHG Financial eliminates 8-12 minutes of data entry work per case by having all of their data automatically integrated into Hummingbird, as a single source of truth.
• Before Hummingbird, BHG Financial's manual SAR filing process took anywhere between 90 minutes to 3 hours. Using Hummingbird, they now do this work in 20-30 minutes.
• BHG Financial uses Hummingbird's narrative templates to improve both the efficiency and quality of SAR narratives, saving them an additional 5-10 minutes per filing.

Impact Metrics

• 77% percent reduction in SAR filing times.
• 0 late or rejected filings thanks to Hummingbird’s notification and validation features.
• 30 minutes saved per audit-related request (over 10 hours saved per business quarter).

Company Overview

BHG Financial, a leader in tailored financial solutions and lending, has built a reputation for risk management and regulatory compliance. For nearly twenty years, it built a rock-solid business by providing loans to established, low-risk businesses owned by medical professionals like  doctors, dentists, and veterinarians. BHG Financial has broadened and grown its customer base by providing online lending products, as well. These approaches have helped it become a leading personal lender, maintaining an A+ rating with the Better Business Bureau while extending loans to over 170k customers.

THE PROBLEM

A manual reporting process striving to keep pace

Prior to adopting Hummingbird, BHG Financial’s process for managing fraud cases and filing suspicious activity reports (SARs) was entirely manual. At the time, they were able to manage this given their relatively low output of regulatory reports. This was due to the low-risk nature of their clientele – largely made up of doctors and other medical professionals – as well as their rigorous Know Your Customer (KYC) processes, which often included on-site visits and personal interviews.

But as BHG Financial shifted its focus to open the door to more modern, digital loan applications, their manual approach to both KYC and SAR filing struggled to match the pace of the company’s growth. According to Bryan Holloway, Financial Crime Director and BSA Officer at BHG, the manual filing process was time-consuming, with each SAR taking between 90 to 180 minutes to complete. With BHG at some points filing hundreds of SARs per quarter, this method was quickly becoming unsustainable. Holloway recalled, "I looked at how long it was, how tedious it was...and I was just like, this is not going to work for what we need to do.”

THE SOLUTION

Hummingbird: a complete compliance operating system

Holloway made the call to stand up a new compliance solution. His reasoning was pragmatic and practical. “You’re either going to pay now, or pay later,” he noted. “And with fines and reputational risk on the line, you want to invest in a program early and avoid having bigger problems down the road.”

With this forward-thinking philosophy in mind, BHG Financial chose Hummingbird to address the challenges of increased alert volumes and a lengthy SAR filing process. Hummingbird’s modular design allowed for BHG Financial to seamlessly connect both its core systems and fraud management platform, directly to Hummingbird. This meant that not only could suspicious activity alerts be automatically sent to Holloway and his team, but all escalated fraud alerts could also be sent to Hummingbird for review and decisioning. By having all of their data automatically integrated into Hummingbird as a single source of truth, Holloway and his team now save 8-12 minutes of data entry work per case.

Hummingbird’s implementation, Holloway recalls, was a major success in itself. “It was amazing. We signed the contract in mid-August and by mid-September we were up and running.” It’s a level of attention to detail that has remained constant. “Nothing’s changed with respect to ongoing support. If there’s an issue, I send an email and it’s usually resolved in just a couple of hours. I can’t remember a time when it took over 24 hours to get a response.”

MAKING AN IMPACT

Benefits

1. Time-Savings and Efficiency

Hummingbird shortened overall SAR filing times dramatically. What previously took 90-180 minutes per SAR filing now takes 20-30 minutes with Hummingbird. As Holloway explained, "If I need to research a case, I can do it in seconds...I can download [documents] in seconds and get them out to where they need to go." This improvement allowed BHG Financial’s compliance team to handle an increased volume of SARs without adding headcount. “I imagine it wouldn’t be unusual to have a team double the size of mine doing the same amount of work, but we’re able to do it because [Hummingbird] has allowed us to streamline everything in a way that works for us.”

2. Scalability and Proactive Compliance

Using Hummingbird allows BHG Financial to stay ahead of regulatory requirements, giving them a proactive stance on compliance. This foresight not only mitigated potential future risks but also showcased BHG’s commitment to compliance excellence. BHG Financial has also begun to implement Hummingbird’s customizable automation tool to automate aspects of their process. For example, they’ve created an automation that selects SAR cases to be given a Quality Assurance review on a regular cadence.

BHG Financial accelerates their QA reviews using Hummingbird Automations. (Note: Demo environment shown.)

They’ve also taken advantage of Hummingbird’s narrative templates feature, which allows them to quickly move through the narrative creation process on simpler cases. These templates help Holloway’s team cut down on typos and mistakes, shaving an additional 5-10 minutes off of the SAR filing process. Knowing how time-consuming it was to review customer documentation like financial records, Holloway and his team turned to Hummingbird’s AI File Summarization feature to speed things up. Today, they use AI File Summarization to get quick, accurate summaries that can be easily used to support the findings of an investigation. This type of forward-looking program management is a big part of how BHG Financial keeps its compliance program running lean despite the increased volume of activity.

3. Improved Auditing and Record-Keeping

Hummingbird keeps a detailed record of all processes and actions executed on the platform, providing BHG Financial with everything they need to efficiently prepare for regulatory audits. This makes it easy for Holloway to quickly fulfill the 15-20 audit-related requests he receives each quarter. He simply downloads the supporting documents, creates a zip file, and emails the information to whomever requested it. At previous organizations, this took Holloway up to an hour per request; but he now saves 30 minutes per request by using Hummingbird.

The platform’s dashboard analytics provide Holloway with a detailed, up-to-the-minute look at his team’s caseload, meaning due dates can be tracked and workloads effectively managed. This level of visibility saves him an hour each week and prevents his team from missing filing deadlines.

BHG Financial uses Hummingbird’s analytics dashboard to track their compliance team’s caseload. (Note: Demo environment shown.)

Conclusion

BHG Financial's adoption of Hummingbird has been the cornerstone for the transformation of their compliance program, allowing them to keep pace with the increased complexity and volume of suspicious activities in the digital lending space. The platform’s ease of use, crystal clear UX, easy integrations, and powerful automation tools have enabled BHG Financial to enhance their compliance efficiency while maintaining a high standard of excellence. For Bryan Holloway, the decision to work with Hummingbird boils down to the combination of cutting-edge technology and steadfast reliability. "Hummingbird is fast, it’s dependable, and I’d onboard it again in any organization I worked at. It’s the Cadillac of compliance software."