Getting Faster, Simpler, Cheaper and More Secure

In June 2020, Coastal Financial Corp. began onboarding financial technology clients to ramp up its banking as a service (BaaS) business.

The $1.8 billion community banking company in Everett, Washington, would lend its bank charter, compliance program and payment rails to nonbanks for a fee. Nine out of 10 of those clients are unregulated by any financial regulator; one out of 10 might be a regulated entity such as a broker-dealer. This arrangement means the bank must monitor its nonbank customers for compliance with anti-money laundering, foreign sanctions and Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) laws.

Andrew Stines, the chief risk officer of Coastal Financial, and his staff of BSA experts keep track of a fluctuating amount of flagged transactions per month, about 3,000 to 4,000, on everything from ACH and loan payments to debit and credit card transactions. It’s a lot. From the bank regulators’ point of view, “I’m the one who really owns that risk,” Stines says.

The company previously had manually pulled flagged transactions for further investigation with Excel spreadsheets. But that didn’t work anymore, given the workload. So Coastal turned to Hummingbird, the winner of Bank Director’s 2021 Best of FinXTech Award for compliance & risk.

Hummingbird automatically pulls flagged transactions from the bank’s core, Neocova, and automates compliance reporting. It sends suspicious activity reports (SARs) to regulators after Coastal Financial conducts investigations. Hummingbird also creates an auditable trail of each case.

The bank is not alone in trying to ramp up its fraud and compliance monitoring and reporting using new software. Financial institutions are under increasing pressure to update their fraud technologies with machine learning, robotic process automation and other tools to combat increasingly sophisticated criminals and higher use of digital services, according to a February 2021 report from the research firm Celent.

Celent Head of Risk Neil Katkov projects that North American financial institutions – which are the greatest targets for global fraud – will spend $3.1 billion on fraud technology in 2021, or 16.1% more than the year before. Spending on fraud operations will amount to another $4.55 billion, he wrote.

The marketplace for fraud and compliance software has become crowded, which benefits banks, says Kevin Tweddle, the senior executive vice president for community bank solutions at the Independent Community Bankers of America.

“People ask me what’s a fintech,” he says. “It makes [banking] faster, simpler, cheaper and more secure.” An especially active group right now are cybersecurity companies, all vying to monitor threats for financial institutions and to help with compliance and reporting requirements.

Finalists in the compliance and risk category for the Best of FinXTech Awards included IT compliance company Adlumin, which uses machine learning to detect threats, malfunctions and operations failures in real time, and the cybersecurity provider DefenseStorm, which is a cybersecurity compliance platform built for banks and credit unions. For more on how Bank Director chose winners, click here.

But Hummingbird was clearly a stand-out for Coastal Financial. The software program was cost competitive, although Stines declines to name the price. Using the software clearly pays for itself, he says. But he admits the company might not need Hummingbird if not for its BaaS business, which adds to the company’s reporting requirements. Stines estimates he’d have to hire four to five additional full-time employees without it.

The drawback is that Hummingbird’s software doesn’t include every tool the banking company needs. But there’s a roadmap to adding functionality, and Hummingbird sticks to its promised dates, Stines says. The real selling factor was the user interface and the fact that Hummingbird seems eager to make changes as needed, and understands Coastal Financial’s technology clients. “They are more forward-thinking and more in tune with digital and fintech services than traditional players in the space,” he says.

This may just be the beginning. For Tweddle, banks and credit unions are enjoying an early to middle development period for fintech. “There’s a lot more interesting things to come,” he says.