How Hummingbird Helped a Leading Canadian Financial Institution Reduce Its STR Filing Process from Hours to Just Minutes

Key Takeaways

• Immediate value
  Hummingbird helped this leading Canadian financial institution clear a backlog of more than 1,000 outstanding cases in just a few months, helping meet an important internal deadline
• Transformative Filing Changes
  With Hummingbird’s intelligent data-field mapping, what had previously been a time-intensive manual process was transformed to a fast, streamlined, and largely automated workflow.
• Improved Case Quality
  Thanks to the reduction in filing time, analysts are able to pursue investigations more rigorously, checking additional sources and spending more time developing a strong report narrative. 

Impact Metrics

• Reduced a 2hr STR filing time down to just minutes, saving 1,378 hours (or 172 business days) over the first seven months post Hummingbird implementation.  
• 1,408 STRs filed in the first 6 months, including 689 auto-created by Hummingbird to handle the need for additional report filing for cases with 99+ transactions.
• Eliminated rejected STRs by streamlining workflows and enforcing robust validation checks. 

Company Overview

With over $15 billion in assets under management, the subject of this case study is a leading Canadian financial institution (LCFI) dedicated to providing quality banking and financial service products. Having built a strong foundation on mortgage products, they’ve recently expanded to offer their customers everything from commercial lending to payment solutions and banking-as-a-service. 

Revamping a time intensive, manual STR filing process 

120 minutes is a long time. Two hours, or fully 25% of a standard 8-hour workday. But that’s how long it took for a leading Canadian financial institution (hereafter “LCFI”) to file each Suspicious Transaction Report (STR) with FINTRAC, Canada’s financial intelligence unit. The immense amount of labor required to compile these reports had contributed to a growing number of cases, as the LCFI routinely encountered cases with reportable transactions amounting to as many as 10 STRs per case. 

In an effort to resolve this issue, internal governance was pushing to implement a system that would automate STR filing – before case levels became unmanageable.

Feeling the pinch of limited time, the LCFI’s compliance team turned to Hummingbird to automate the tedious, manual aspects of STR filing.

Transformative Filing and Improved Investigations with Hummingbird

Hummingbird had only recently been implemented when internal governance began its push to have the case backlog cleared, meaning the platform would receive a trial by fire. The LCFI’s compliance team remembers: “We started out by slamming the system [Hummingbird] with everything, because it was that or hire 50 people to help push those cases through. So that was also a measure of the success of the product, our ability to clear that backlog in such a short timeframe.”

A filing breakthrough

Hummingbird transformed the LCFI's STR filing process, automatically mapping case data to the appropriate fields, dramatically reducing filing time. (Note: demo environment shown.)

Prior to Hummingbird, the institution had been processing STRs manually, which involved individually inputting the details of each transaction into the FINTRAC portal. “It takes a long time,” recalls a senior leader from the LCFI’s compliance team, “because it’s not just copy/pasting – each transaction has five different fields you need to fill out.” There were no shortcuts, whether a case contained five transactions or 500. With Hummingbird, however, the compliance team was able to effectively automate this entire process. Hummingbird automatically sorted through all the transaction data, organizing and mapping the data to the right fields in the STR report. What used to be the single most time-intensive aspect of compliance operations was now a fast, easy, and (most importantly) reliable aspect of their process. 

Above and Beyond

Hummingbird went the extra mile to help the LCFI file STRs in the most efficient way possible. STRs have a 99 transaction limit per report, meaning that any case containing more than this amount will require another, additional report be filed. When this happens, much of the global case information needs to be re-included in the report. Knowing how much time the LCFI was losing to this repetitive manual taskwork, Hummingbird stepped in with a feature that automatically generates a new STR report for any case whose transactions top the FINTRAC limit. (Note: this aspect of STR filing was recently changed, and additional reports no longer need to be generated after 99+ transactions.)

Improved filing makes room for better narratives

Using Hummingbird to automatically handle the most time-intensive aspect of their process provided the financial institution with another important benefit. “Because we no longer need to allocate the lion’s share of our time to manually working on filing,” the compliance team reports, “We can be really careful and deliberate with how we craft our narrative. We have more time to reread things, to consult other sources – we can really put in the extra effort that will take a case to the next level in terms of quality. It’s what allows us to put together the best, most high-impact case possible.”

Filterable dashboards fuel more effective program oversight

Filterable dashboards allow the LCFI to quickly look at various aspects of program performance. (Note: demo environment shown.) 

Another key benefit of using Hummingbird is that the LCFI can easily create custom views of program performance. As a senior compliance leader notes: “it’s really helpful for keeping on top of how my team is doing. I can create views for each of them, for example, or I can create a view for each of the workflow stages. No matter what I’m looking for, I’m able to have that easy overview into what stage every case is at.” For the LCFI, it’s a benefit that has allowed them to manage a growing caseload, despite the team remaining small.  

Results & Outcomes

Hummingbird has helped drive major process improvements while dramatically improving efficiency. The Canadian financial institution has:

• Filed 1,408 STRs, including 689 that were auto-created due to FINTRAC’s 99 transaction limit, to FINTRAC in the first six months of implementing Hummingbird.
• Saved 1,378 hours (or 172 business days) in “man hours” in the first seven months after implementing Hummingbird.
• Eliminated rejected STRs by streamlining workflows and enforcing robust validation checks using Hummingbird.

Looking Ahead

With its formerly manual workflow effectively streamlined and the compliance team firing on all cylinders, the LCFI is already looking towards the future. They’re interested in exploring how best to transfer the efficiency gains and process enhancements they’ve made to STR filing and program oversight to other parts of their compliance operations. The list already includes deeper engagement with Hummingbird’s case management suite, as well as integrations with identity verification service providers. 

Now, however, they can afford to take their time. “It’s a measure of our current success,” concludes the LCFI’s Compliance Team Lead, “that we don’t have to consider timelines as much – because everything now has such a steady flow.”