Building Meaningful AML Management Information
A practitioner's account of how to design management information that supports decisions, not just describes activity.
For Board Members, Audit Committee chairs, MLROs, Heads of Compliance, Risk Committee chairs and executive sponsors responsible for the financial crime MI pack.
Guide 008 sets out, page by page, what meaningful financial crime MI looks like. It distinguishes activity, quality and residual risk; describes the five-question rebuild that strips a pack back to what actually drives decisions; sets out how to write commentary that names change, cause, meaning and action; defines escalation thresholds in advance rather than under pressure; sets out a working twelve-page Board MI pack as a starting point; describes how MI during remediation needs to coexist with standing MI without supplanting it; sets out the discipline of the annual MI rebuild; names the five quiet failure modes (definition drift, threshold drift, page retirement, commentary thinning, owner drift); and closes with the six signs that say a pack is working. The appendix carries a working KRI register with thresholds and named owners.
Inside you will find
- What MI is for, and what it is not
- The three lenses: activity, quality, residual risk
- Designing a Board MI pack from a blank page; the five-question rebuild
- KRIs and KPIs used honestly; thresholds defined in advance
- Commentary that earns its place: change, cause, meaning, action
- The annual MI rebuild and how MI fails quietly
- Appendix: a working KRI register and a brief for the Audit Committee
This is the guide I would hand to the MLRO the week they are asked to rebuild the Board pack, and to the Audit Committee chair the week before they next sit through one. It does not describe MI in the abstract. It describes the work: the pages drafted, the numbers chosen, the trends interpreted, the commentary written, and the decisions the pack should leave the Board having taken.
Fourteen sections, in the working order of an MI cycle. The first four cover what MI is for and how to design it. The middle six cover what each tier of the pack should contain and how to read it. The last four cover thresholds, escalation, the annual rebuild and how to tell when MI has stopped earning its place on the agenda.
Structured to be useful, not to impress.
What MI is for, and what it is not
The three lenses: activity, quality, residual risk
Designing a Board MI pack from a blank page; the five-question rebuild
KRIs and KPIs used honestly; thresholds defined in advance
Commentary that earns its place: change, cause, meaning, action
The annual MI rebuild and how MI fails quietly
Appendix: a working KRI register and a brief for the Audit Committee
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