Cash Intensive Restaurant

Background

You are an analyst in the financial crime unit of a mid-sized Indian private bank. Transaction monitoring has raised an alert on the current account of a single-outlet restaurant in Indore.

Customer

Spice Route Hospitality Pvt Ltd — a 42-seat restaurant onboarded eighteen months ago as a medium-risk SME customer.

Your objective

Decide whether the cash activity is consistent with the declared business, and recommend a disposition to the Principal Officer.

Initial concern

Quarterly cash deposits are 3.4x the declared expected turnover and cluster immediately below the INR 10 lakh cash reporting aggregation threshold.