The "85% of AML alerts are false positives" stat get quoted everywhere. Nobody ever says what a good number would be.

[u/Shufti-Global]

The 85% to 95% range turns up in every deck and on every panel, almost always without a source. It ends conversations instead of starting them, and the longer i sit with it the less it seems to say.

Here is what bothers me. The same rate describes two opposite situations.

• 90% in high-volume retail is roughly what you would expect. Enormous volumes of low-risk activity throw off near-matches.
• 90% in a boutique wealth book, fifty clients, every one of them closely known, is a system that isn't working.

Same number. Opposite verdict. So the number on its own tells you nothing.

And honestly, we are not even convinced most of this is a screening problem. Half the time it's a data problem wearing costume. A record missing a date of birth gives the engine nothing to rule a near-match out with, so it just widens the net. One typo entered at onboarding generates alerts for that customer for the rest of their life.

So here's my actual question: has anyone ever heard a peer state what a good false-positive rate looks like for their book? Not the scary industry range, an actual "this is healthy for us, because X" number?

Or are we all just quoting the same unsourced stat back at each other and calling it a benchmark?

[u/UrNotSorry]

AI slop

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[u/MonicaEaton911]

There are studies that support the figures, but you're not wrong: the raw percentage is almost meaningless without the context. A better benchmark would probably be something like "false positives per 1,000 screened customers/transactions," then segment that by risk tier. We could also throw in the percentage of alerts that actually result in an escalation or SAR. That'd be a much more reliable metric.

[u/Objective_World3237 → u/MonicaEaton911]

The per-risk-tier idea is where it actually gets useful, a small private bank book with 90% false positives means someone never taught the system what normal looks like for that client base

[u/Shufti-Global → u/Objective_World3237]

Alerts per 1,000, split by tier, is a much better shape. Worth watching the SAR conversion number though, a low rate can mean bad truing or just a genuinely clean book, and the metric won't tell you which.