AML & Financial Crime interview questions

Transaction monitoring, sanctions and PEP screening, alert triage and case management, and false-positive economics.

3 questions in Banking & Financial Services.

Banking & PaymentsA 24-minute read on how the topic fits together, before the questions.Banking and financial services fundamentals60 short answers on one page, for revising rather than studying.

hard3

hardScenario

A cross-border payment reaches you with the originator shown only as a customer of the sending bank. What do you do with it, and what should your own system never have sent?

Missing originator or beneficiary detail destroys the receiving bank's ability to screen and monitor, so the payment is held rather than paid on. You request the missing information, judge the correspondent relationship on how often this happens, and never let your own outbound path drop fields it was given.

6 minmid, senior, staff

hardConceptScenario

How is sanctions screening different from transaction monitoring, and what happens when a payment hits a name on a list?

Monitoring detects suspicion and tolerates misses; sanctions screening is a prohibition with no risk appetite, so it runs before the money moves and stops it. A hit is held, investigated against the list entry, then discounted, rejected, or frozen and reported to the authority.

6 minmid, senior, staff

hardScenarioCase Study

Your transaction monitoring alerts are over ninety per cent false positive. Is that a defect, and what would you do about it?

It is mostly not a defect. Monitoring is a screening control tuned for recall against a base rate so low that high precision is arithmetically impossible, so the work is measuring the rate honestly, moving volume from rules to models and from analysts to enrichment.

6 minsenior, staff, lead