Conducting BSA Board Training
This Compliance Clip (video) provides a number of practical tips on how to execute a good BSA training session for your Board of Directors. Adam provides three main things that could be included in Board training and explains several best practices for ensuring an effective training session. The video concludes by discussing a valuable resource that may assist some BSA Officers in training their Board.
You can view our BSA Training For the Board of Directors in our store at www.compliancecohort.com/store.
Video Transcript
The following is a transcript of this video.
This Compliance Clip is focusing on conducting BSA training for your board of directors. The Board is ultimately responsible for your BSA/AML program, but how much information do they really need to know during their annual training session? Well, that's a great question.
Your Board is very busy, they have a lot to do and BSA can be a bit of details. That's a good way to put it, right? It can be very minute, very complex, it is deep, that your but your directors may not be able to comprehend it or want to and frankly they don't need to comprehend all the details that your BSA officer needs. But your examiners have this expectation that they know everything about everything. So, what do you do?
In presenting BSA training to the board, I recommend including three main things. First of all, you should talk about an introduction and history of BSA because they need to understand what the acronym BSA stands for, not just BSA. BSA stands for the Bank Secrecy Act and they need to understand what money laundering is and CIP and some of those key pieces and key elements to the Bank Secrecy Act. You also then should talk about the five pillars. Since the five pillars are foundational to your program and your board has ultimate responsibility for the program, they need to understand what those five pillars are. Also, it's very important that you talk to your directors on how the program applies to them and what they should be looking for.
Now, there are a few tips that you can take if you're going to conduct BSA training for your board of directors.
First and foremost, it needs to be comprehensive but not too short. Trust me, it is a balancing act, walking that tightrope, trying to get the difference between comprehensive and not too short. And what is that perfect time frame for BSA training? I believe it's probably between 25 and 30 minutes. Much more than 30 minutes, you lose your directors, but BSA is so comprehensive and so high risk that I really don't think you can breeze through it in about 10 minutes. So to give a full comprehensive training, I believe the 25- to 30-minute window is ideal for your training session.
Now, when you're training your directors you need to keep it high level. They don't need to know the details but they need to understand the high level concepts because they have ultimate oversight of your program and they have ultimate responsibility. Also, it's important to give them tips on what to look for. My favorite thing to think of is if I were a director what would I want to know? So you can tell them different things on how it applies to them, what things to look for, provide them some tricks, some tips, some resources to make their life easier when it comes to having ultimate responsibility for BSA and having that oversight of the function.
Also, it's a good idea to give them a handout. I love giving a handout in my training sessions because it becomes what I call proof of content. Your examiners always ask for what was trained in a training session. And when you have a handout that you give to your directors, you can give that to your examiners and say, look, this is what they received. Now, here's a little trick for you: you don't have to cover everything on the handout. Some of your directors and most of your directors will read the entire thing. But in the training itself, you don't need to cover everything. BSA, as you know, could take days to train on appropriately. But with your directors, you may only have 20 or 30 minutes to do so. That way you can use a handout to supplement that time that you may not have had.
Now, of course, if you don't want to do training yourself, we do have a program and this program is basically what we've just talked about. If you're interested in this program, take a look at it in the link below the video.
That's all I have for you today.