Unusual Activity Detection

Unusual activity detection is the stage of financial crime monitoring in which a bank or other regulated firm spots activity that does not fit what it expects from a customer, an account or a peer group, such as a sudden surge in cash deposits, payments to new countries or a dormant account becoming busy. Detection can come from rules and models in transaction monitoring, from statistical anomaly detection that compares customers with their own history and with similar customers, or from staff who notice something odd. Unusual does not mean suspicious: an alert is reviewed against what the firm knows, and only activity that cannot be reasonably explained moves on to a suspicion decision and possibly a report. Rules are often built from a suspicious activity indicator or a transaction monitoring scenario. Also see unusual activity report.