FirstBank Deploys Appian Cloud for Anti-Money Laundering

RESTON, VA–(Marketwired – Jun 6, 2016) – Appian, a leading BPM and Case Management platform provider, today announced that FirstBank, the largest locally-owned banking organization in Colorado with more than $15 billion in assets, has deployed Appian Cloud for intelligent case management in rapidly identifying and resolving potential money laundering schemes. With continued focus from federal regulators of the U.S. banking system, financial institutions continue to look for ways to enhance their AML 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. 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,” said Ryan Buerger, IT Director at FirstBank.

The Appian system also includes a Quality Control process that periodically provides a random set of cases to internal FirstBank auditors to review the quality of case handling.

“Financial Services firms are under great pressure from regulators, ratings firms, and law enforcement to improve their AML efforts,” said Michael Heffner, Global Capital Markets and Banking Industry Lead at Appian. “Appian makes it possible to quickly solve AML challenges by managing compliance work holistically across functions, lines-of-business, and geographies without engaging in complex, expensive, and time-consuming re-architecting efforts.”

About Appian
Appian delivers an enterprise platform for Business Process Management (BPM) and Case Management solutions. Appian unites users with all their data, processes, and collaborations in one environment, on any mobile device, through a simple social interface. On-premise and in the cloud, Appian is the fastest way to solve complex issues with modern apps. For more information, visit www.appian.com.