A regulatory reporting operation needed to improve speed and absorb growth while protecting control quality.
The situation
Currency Transaction Reports are filed against a fixed regulatory clock, and the volume of reportable activity was rising faster than the team that prepared them. Manual work, inconsistent handoffs between the people who gathered, reviewed and filed each report, and friction in the workflow were limiting throughput. The default answer would have been more analysts.
The challenges
The work was spread across several roles with no agreed standard for how a report moved from one to the next, so each handoff carried its own re-checking. Rework was invisible in the aggregate numbers because every report eventually filed on time; the cost was in overtime, in reviewer attention spent on low-risk items, and in a backlog that grew with every acquisition and every month of organic growth. Any change had to preserve filing accuracy and the audit trail regulators expect.
What Alacer did
Alacer applied Kaizen principles to the CTR process end to end: mapped every step as it was actually performed, measured where time was spent against where value was added, removed steps that existed only because of an earlier handoff, standardized the ones that remained, and helped the team adopt the improved process rather than hand them a document describing it.
Documented results
The published case study reports 40% faster CTR filings, with the team able to absorb growth in reportable volume without additional staffing. Capacity was found inside the existing process before any new system or headcount was considered, which is the order EPIF now formalizes.
Historical Alacer engagement. Wording and results are based on the published Alacer case summary. Numbers reflect the scope and time of this engagement; results vary. EPIF is the firm’s current methodology and is not presented as the named framework used in this historical project.