Operations teams worry that an AML assessment will halt onboarding for days. That rarely needs to happen if sampling is planned against product risk rather than against every open application.
Agree the population first: accounts opened in a defined window, segmented by product and geography. Random selection within strata keeps the sample defensible without requiring a full archive dump overnight.
Ask reviewers to work from exported chronologies and imaging systems rather than borrowing paper files from desks. Physical file borrowing is where queues form.
Schedule interviews away from peak clearing hours. A thirty-minute walkthrough with a senior onboarding analyst often surfaces more about exception handling than another hour of document reading.
When exceptions appear, distinguish missing evidence from genuine control failure. Many 'gaps' are naming inconsistencies in folders; those belong in a housekeeping list, not in a high-severity finding.