Customer Activity Profile (Expected Activity)

At onboarding, and at each review, the bank asks the customer about the purpose of the account and the activity to come: monthly turnover, cash use, typical payment sizes, countries dealt with and main counterparties. It tests the answers against what it knows, such as the customer's job, business and income. The result is stored as a profile. Monitoring systems then compare real activity against it, and large gaps raise an alert. A salaried employee whose account suddenly handles large international transfers looks very different from a trading company that does so every week. Profiles are only useful if they are realistic and updated, since vague entries such as 'general business' make deviations impossible to see. Peer-group profiles, built from customers of a similar type, may supplement or replace individual figures. Analysts who see a gap between profile and activity start with a call to the customer, since the answer is sometimes a new contract or a property sale.

The owner of a small clothing shop opens a business account and says she expects around 40,000 a month in card receipts and no international payments. Six months later, the account receives 15 transfers from five countries in a week, totalling 300,000, and sends most onward. The monitoring system alerts because activity is far outside the profile, and an analyst contacts her for an explanation.