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HummingbirdEnterprise SaaS

Tools for fighting financial crime

An enterprise compliance platform for the teams who investigate financial crime and report it to regulators.

My role
Product Designer, on a small design team working across the platform
The platform
Case management · Investigations · Automations · Regulatory reporting

The context

Who Hummingbird served

  • What was the product?

    Hummingbird — a financial crime compliance platform, from surfacing suspicious activity to filing regulatory reports.

  • Who were the users?

    Financial crime investigators reviewing flagged transactions, building cases, and deciding what gets reported to regulators. High volume, legal consequences.

  • What were the stakes?

    Regulatory compliance. Missed filings and flawed decisions expose institutions to legal and reputational risk.

Hummingbird case overview: summary cards for transactions, alerts, connections, locations and case status above a table of subjects with their risk labels and linked cards

01 · Self-service configuration

Their procedure, not ours

Every compliance team runs its own procedure. Self-service configuration let teams build their own review types inside Hummingbird: the stages, the tasks in each, and which ones were required. I designed it.

  • The problem

    Each review captured different information and closed with different steps. A new review type meant waiting on us to set it up.

  • The hard part

    Giving compliance teams real control over how a case was structured, without letting them build one that broke the case or its record.

The review type builder · Not shipped when I left

  • Settings for an Enhanced Due Diligence review type: two stages, Prepare EDD Review with 12 tasks and an Escalation decision, on a 30-day timeline, with an Add Stage button
    01 · Review stages
  • The Prepare EDD Review stage opened: its 13 tasks listed on the left, some marked with a lock, and the Research task's title, description and checklist on the right
    02 · A stage's tasks
  • The stage editor: the task list on the left, and the Research task's name, a required toggle, title, description and checklist, with a Publish button
    03 · Editing a task
  • The Add task dialog: create a custom task, or pick from predefined task templates such as Subjects, Net Activity & Dates, Filings Details and Products & Instruments
    04 · Adding a task
  • A new untitled task added to the end of the task list, with empty name, title and description fields and an Add Section button
    05 · A custom task
  • A confirmation dialog asking whether to publish changes to the U.S. Filing stage, over the editor with its task list and a panel of input types
    06 · Publishing a change

02 · Investigations

Everything in one view

A case pulled evidence from everywhere, and the investigator had to weigh it and make a call that might end up in front of a regulator. The design problem was density: putting the evidence in one place without burying the decision. Every view had to answer two questions quickly:

What happened?

Flagged transactions, the customer's history, prior cases, analyst notes and outside data.

What still needs doing?

Open tasks, and the decision still to make.

A subject's page inside a case: notes, basic information with two addresses on a map, web links and saved searches, with a US SAR filing panel open alongside at step 3 of 5, choosing which subjects and accounts to include

03 · Automations

Powerful, not dangerous

Automations handed routine work to the product: routing cases, flagging familiar patterns, sending standard notifications. In compliance an automation acts on the institution's behalf, so it had to be:

  1. 01

    Readable before it ran

    Trigger, conditions and action, in plain language.

  2. 02

    Easy to switch off

    Any automation could be paused or edited at any time.

  3. 03

    On the record afterwards

    When it ran, and what it did.

An automation in the builder: when subjects are tagged as a sanctions match, send a webhook to reject their accounts, with its trigger, conditions and action laid out as When and Do steps, a Running toggle, and usage and history details

04 · Regulatory reporting

Written for a regulator

When an investigation ends in a filing, the output is a Suspicious Activity Report, filed with FinCEN. Examiners can review it later, so every part has to hold up.

Structured fields
Subjects, amounts, dates and the type of activity.
A written narrative
Who, what, when, where, why and how, in the investigator's words.
A deadline
30 days from initial detection, 60 at most.

The design problem was carrying the investigator's work from the case into the filing accurately, so the filing told the same story as the case.

The narrative template editor open over a case: saved templates such as Case summary, Check Kiting Fraud and Simple Structuring on the left, and a draft narrative listing the individuals, businesses and transaction totals above the written account, with a prompt to type @ to fill in case data