"It is not surprising to me, to see the SAR %'s change as reflected. As mid tier and large banks continue to spend money on robust front end prevention systems and tools, it is inevitable the thieves that use the banking arena as their playground will migrate to the banks that offer the path of least resistance to engage in their financial thievery. You talk with any analyst or investigator and they will tell you one goal is to get the crook to bank at their competitor down the street. In my opinion the crooks have a stronger communication channel and they spread the word quickly as whom to target. Historically, the fraud the big banks see has not trickled down to the smaller banks, but times are changing. So my guess is we will continue to see this trend for a little while before it levels out. As a long time bank fraud investigator, what is more interesting to me is what % of the SAR's filed, results in some form of federal investigation and prosecution. Across the entire spectrum from the analyst and investigator to law enforcement and FINCEN (and others not known) a lot of man hours are put into SAR filings and datamining. I can count one hand, ok maybe two, the number of follow up call's I received in all my years of filing SAR's By no means am I saying that SAR's are not relevant and are not an important part of an investigation, but I wonder if one of the main purposes is to track and report the fraud to FINCEN ( for later use), is there an easier more automated way to provide this data. SAR's are good if you think about the ability for link analysis and collusive networking detection, but all the details in the narrative, is it really needed? Is there another way to get the data to FINCEN which is less time consuming for the analysts and the investigators? As a former investigator we were always driven to find inefficiencies and make them efficient, work smart, (you know the drill) and the SAR was always one hurdle I came across that was a necessary evil of inefficiency. So as we see reports come out about # of SAR filings trending up or down, think of the time and money saved if it was only more efficient. So you love SAR's , an investigator, this is why I hated SAR's. "