For those of you that use Yellow Hammer for risk rating customers. What scores are you using for low, medium, high risk customers? Thank you.

I would be happy to give you my risk ranges for H/M/L, but they mean nothing without knowing what risk factors I use and the corresponding risk scores for those factors.

You need to look at the risk factors you have decided to use and determine where the H/M/L ranges should be. A good way to get started is to simply look at your current risk scores, you should know most of your higher risk clients. See where they land and make sure you set your ranges accordingly. Any other clients that have similar scores would then have similar risk. Also, if you have higher risk customers and they are not in the higher risk scores, find out why.

We have the scores set at L:0-25, M:26-50, H:51 and higher. The risk worklist picks up every customer that is not even relevant because of this score method. Our tree questions range in scores from 0-100. For example, if the MSB question gets answered yes, a score of 100 is assigned. If the charitable organization question gets answered yes, a score of 75 is assigned, etc. What I'm trying to find out is what is a reasonable rating score to have the customers classified under. Thank you.

I had a JH YH consultant in a few months ago and he stated YH is geared off of a high risk score of 50. You need to look at what questions you are scoring on and how you are scoring them. I currently have Low: 0 to 19; Medium: 20 to 49; and High: 50+. You need to answer the questions based upon the bank's risk profile.

It also depends on how you are scoring the individual questions. You need to be careful of 'double-dipping' also; asking the same type/category of question and ending up scoring twice (or more).

For example, I have all non-profit accts score off of business type, then I have another question to identify whether it is a charity and score for that. I tiered the scoring for some categories such as this. One score for being a non-profit, and then if a charity, an additional score is added.

It sounds like you have the scoring on questions set too high. You may need to evaluate what value the scores are providing for each type of customer. Also, if high risk starts at 51, why are you giving MSB 100 and charity 75. If they are high risk because of who they are, why not score them 51? If you have activity scores set, they will receive add'l points for their activity.

For higher risk customer types, such as attorney's, we score based off the NAICS code, but I only have that score 20 - medium risk. It's their activity, risky product types, and account activity that may push their scoring into High Risk (50+). For example, an attorney with an office down the street that handles the occasional divorce, has minimual activity, and an occasional domestic wire, may continue to score as medium. On the other hand, an international contracts attorney will have a high volume of international wires which based on the scores set on foreign wires would push it into High Risk and flag for EDD review.

I hope this helps.

I have pretty much the same risk scoring setup as Madawaska, at least as far as how I assign points based on NAICS codes etc. However, I have the same ranges that came out of the box, L:0-25, M:26-50, H:51 and higher.

One thing that I have changed is how the system adds points for SARs. If you file a SAR through the YH SAR center, YH will add 50 points to the risk score for ever and ever amen. We disagree with that philosphy, so I file SARs manually, and add 50 points to the risk score via a risk setting, for 12 months following a SAR filng, after which time it will fall off.

P.S. I don't mean to hijack the thread but do any of you YH users use the Enhanced Wire Worklist feature for wire monitoring? If anyone answers yes, I'll start a new thread for further details.

I do not use the Enhanced Wire Worklist, but would definitely be looking into this in the furture.

Also, my low, medium, high range settings were modified to make sure the higher-risk NAICS or SOC customers score at least medium risk. After we set and entered the scores at 20, we realized the range would only score customers as Low if that was the only reason they obtained a score. So we lowered the score to make sure they get scored at least medium risk.

We also do not use the SAR filing through YH. We have a question in EDD to identify whether a SAR was filed on the customer and assigned a score of 50. We will always have our SAR customers score high risk.