I Love SARs (Part 3 in a Three Part Series)
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It's been awhile since I posted part 1 and part 2 in this three part series, and have I been missing my SARs. In the first post I examined how overall SAR filing has changed, and post 2 covered how filing patterns have evolved for different type of institutions. As promised, in this post I'll dive into the details of specific kinds of SARs and how they have changed over time.
So, what types of SARs are being filed? (Note: I've excluded BSA and Money Laundering SARs, they are the undisputed champions!)
From the chart you can see that Check, Mortgage Loan, Credit Card, Counterfeit Check and Check Kiting are the top 5. Sorry "Other", you don't count! This provides a good baseline for thinking about the types of SARs, but I don't think this will be particularly surprising to anyone. What I'm really interested in is the rate of change of the SAR filing. So below I've created a table below that shows the top 10 SAR types ranked by growth rate for 2008.
Looking at just last year's SAR growth rate, you can see that wire transfer fraud was the champion, followed by consumer loan fraud, identity theft, check kiting and mortgage loan fraud rounding out the top 5. Is this consistent with what you're seeing at your institution?
One year of results is interesting, but it's just that, one year. We shouldn't draw conclusions based on such a limited data set. So now I've added growth rates for the last 5 and 10 years to the fastest growing SAR types from 2008 . I've sorted the table by the 10 year growth rate but you can just as easily look at the five year results too.
The most interesting are the fastest growing from last year but that also have been consistent over the 10 and 5 year periods. See any surprises here? As I've pointed out before, I love SARs because the data provides great macro-level insight into the trends that banks and credit unions are dealing with everyday. I look forward to Fincen's next By The Numbers report!