Definition
Transaction Monitoring
The automated and manual review of customer transactions against expected behaviour and known typologies, to surface activity that may warrant a SAR.
By Bart Mierzejewski · Founder, FinCrime Desk · Reviewed Sep 19, 2026
Why it matters
Transaction monitoring is the largest single job family on this site after BSA/AML generally, and the one where tooling knowledge translates most directly into pay. Named platform experience — Actimize, Verafin, Unit21, Hawk, Oracle FCCM — appears constantly in the postings we index.
In practice
Most production systems are still rules-based with tuned thresholds, increasingly supplemented by models. The operational metrics that matter are alert volume, false-positive rate, alert-to-case conversion, and SAR conversion. Tuning and threshold testing is a specialism in its own right, and model validation is a distinct, better-paid one.