I am the BSA Officer for a small community bank that uses BMA (BankRite) as our core processing system. I keep reading about the requirement to have a SAR monitoring system. Currently we mainly rely on tellers to catch any suspicious activity.

I've just superficially looked in GlobalVision, and Bankers Toolbox. I'm guessing that these vendors don't have a whole lot of experience working with BMA due to their reaction when I told them that BMA was our core processing system. Additionally, there cost is somewhat prohibitive for a small bank like mine.

Does anyone out there use BMA, and have a recommendation for a vendor, or how to monitor suspicious activity?

I am not familiar with your system, but I looked over a product by SYBASE and found it integrated easily.

Until we implemented an automated system, we had a number of reports created that we actually still use:

Monetary instrument sales - all monetary instruments (cash or not) are entered into our core processing system. We receive a download report that provides the previous weeks sales, with all information, purchaser, beneficiary, $, cash or not, TIN, Branch, Teller # - this is imported into Excel and aggregated over whatever period of time we want. This report can be sorted by any of the fields mentioned above and is used to look for suspicious activity such as a customer going to several branches purchasing cashier's checks or money orders.

Wires - We receive a download of all wires that is imported into Excel and allows us to sort by originator, beneficiary, TIN, account number etc. While we have a system that flags changes in customer activity, we still like to look at this excel file because you can see several months of a customer's activity at once and see patterns, changes in patterns, etc.

Cash in and out of bank - We receive a daily download of all cash by account and TIN that can again be aggregated by any time period and sorted to look for unusual patterns or changes. We can cross-reference it against the customer list to match the TIN and Account with names.

You should also look at kiting reports, overdraft reports, large dollar transaction reports, anything that will show cash or other transactional data. Also review subpoenas received. Do you consider ATM fraud and other types of fraud in your suspicious activity reviews? Those are important as well.