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FirstBank

With more than $15 billion in assets and over 120 locations, FirstBank is the largest locally-owned banking organization in Colorado, and still growing.

FirstBank: Fast, Intelligent AML Case Management

Business Problem

Like many financial institutions who continue to be under scrutiny from federal regulators of the U.S. banking system, FirstBank was looking for ways to enhance their anti-money laundering efforts to assist law enforcement and ensure compliance with regulatory expectations.

FirstBank initially built its AML solution in SharePoint, but encountered issues with workflow visibility, system scalability and extensibility, and data synchronization between various FirstBank systems and databases. AML is a high-risk and time-sensitive process in terms of regulatory requirements, and the SharePoint system required manual intervention that took significant IT time.

Appian Solution

FirstBank chose Appian Cloud for its new AML solution in part due to Appian’s fast time-to-market, and its ability to tune the solution to how FirstBank wanted to operate (as opposed to changing FirstBank’s processes to conform to solution limitations).

The central feature of the system is Appian’s enterprise data management capability, Appian Records. Appian Records provides a full-visibility snapshot into the status of all potential AML cases, along with all associated case information, documentation, comments and collaborations. All required process actions are available directly from the case Record, and the system enforces proper process execution while providing complete audit trails of all cases. The system pulls automatically-generated AML Alerts from FirstBank’s core system on a nightly basis, and also allows for any employee to report on concerning activity. All data input into Appian, whether systematically or by an individual, is then is intelligently routed to an appropriate work queue based on the characteristics of the case, and a core team of AML experts then process each case.

“Appian was chosen because it is a performant, secure, and reliable platform on which we could quickly implement AML Case Management.”

Ryan Buerger
IT Director at FirstBank