Avoided significant fines and potential consent order
Reporting cycle reduced from days of analyst time to automated refresh
Every AFC metric documented with single definition and named owner
Reconciliation checks at every pipeline stage
Delivered a regulatory-grade Tableau reporting suite for the US Anti-Financial Crime division of an international investment bank, replacing fragile manual processes with automated, governed reporting. The work resolved critical data lineage gaps, established metric definitions and reconciliation controls, and enabled the bank to demonstrate compliant reporting capability at federal examination.
The Problem
The bank's US Anti-Financial Crime division was under direct scrutiny from federal regulators, including the Federal Reserve. The issue was not that reporting did not exist: it did. The issue was that nobody could demonstrate, with confidence, that the numbers were right.
The Solution
We led the delivery of a regulatory-grade reporting suite, beginning with urgent mobilisation: relocation to New York, direct embedding with AFC operations and compliance teams, and immediate triage of the most critical reporting gaps. The work ran in three parallel phases.
Stabilise. We mapped every regulatory expectation to a specific metric, definition, source, and owner through a requirements traceability matrix. Every AFC metric (filing volumes, cycle times, dispositioning rates, escalation counts) was given a single agreed definition, specifying numerator, denominator, inclusion criteria, and source field. Getting to agreement required bringing Compliance, Operations, and Technology together to resolve disputes that had festered for months. Each definition was assigned a named owner responsible for it going forward.
Rebuild. The patchwork of spreadsheets and undocumented scripts was replaced with an automated Tableau reporting suite backed by certified data sources. Row-level security ensured each stakeholder saw precisely the data they were authorised to view. Reconciliation checks ran at every pipeline stage: row counts validated after each join, aggregate totals compared between source and reporting layer, and known data quality issues logged and tracked. For structural data problems that could not be fixed overnight, we defined governed short-term workarounds (documented, with named owners and expiry dates) alongside longer-term remediation items for the technology backlog.
Sustain. Ownership was defined at three levels: individual metric owners, a reporting operations team for pipeline health, and a governance forum for approving changes. The longer-term remediation backlog was handed to the bank's data engineering teams as a sequenced plan tied to regulatory commitments.
Results and Impact
| Metric | Outcome |
|---|---|
| Regulatory risk | Avoided significant fines and potential consent order |
| Examination outcome | Demonstrated compliant reporting capability and credible remediation plan |
| Manual effort | Reduced reporting cycle from days of analyst time to automated refresh |
| Metric definitions | Every AFC metric documented with a single definition and named owner |
| Data controls | Reconciliation checks at every pipeline stage; issues logged and tracked |
| Stakeholder confidence | Compliance and senior management able to stand behind reported numbers |
| Operational risk | Eliminated single-person dependencies in the reporting chain |
The most important outcome was that the bank could sit in front of its regulators and say, with evidence: we know what we are reporting, we know where the data comes from, we know what is still broken, and here is our plan to fix it. That combination of transparency and rigour is what avoided enforcement action.
Key Takeaways
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Regulators care about traceability, not aesthetics. A plain report with documented lineage, agreed definitions, and reconciliation controls will satisfy an examiner. A beautiful dashboard built on ungoverned data will not.
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Stabilisation starts with agreeing on what "truth" means. The single highest-value activity was forcing alignment on metric definitions. Until everyone agrees on what a number represents, every report is a source of confusion rather than clarity.
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Short-term workarounds are acceptable if they are governed. Regulators do not expect every data problem to be solved immediately. They expect honesty about what is broken, a controlled workaround for the interim, and a credible plan with dates and owners for the permanent fix.