SAS leads money-laundering fight

Aite Group has ranked SAS Anti-Money Laundering as the top anti-money laundering software provider in its Global Anti-Money Laundering Vendor Evaluation survey.

Aite Group’s Global Anti-Money Laundering Vendor Evaluation: A Reinvigorated Market ranks SAS Anti-Money Laundering as the top anti-money laundering (AML) software provider. Aite Group interviewed 36 financial institutions and 18 leading vendors in the global AML space between January and April 2011. Financial organisations spanned five continents and ranged from US$800 million to more than US$1 trillion in assets.

The report cited analytics, visual data integration, pre-packaged scenarios and scalability as the offering’s strengths, giving high ratings in both performance and customer service responsiveness. SAS Anti-Money Laundering harnesses analytics to provide more effective alert processing and offers massive cost savings to banks by reducing false positives and freeing investigative resources.

“SAS brings a significant amount of analytic firepower to the space, given its roots in statistical solutions,”” said Julie Conroy McNelley, Senior Analyst for Aite Group’s Retail Banking Practice. “”SAS has a wide range of pre-packaged scenarios that are available with the solution, allowing for easy adjustment for financial institutions as needed. The solution’s architecture is a plus for smaller institutions that don’t have a data warehouse in place, as it provides the data schema for creating a data mart, and can support a number of different relational databases.””

Aite Group noted that “”SAS also provides a Teradata solution for large [institutions] that can process a vast amount of data in a relatively short period of time. In a proof of concept with one large client, SAS demonstrated an ability to process 2.5 billion transactions well within the allotted processing window.””

The report predicts the current global $450 million AML software market “”will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 9 percent over the next few years, reaching $690 million in 2015.”” Market drivers include “”rapid growth in the Asia Pacific, the Middle East and Africa: financial institutions in the United States and Europe replacing outdated solutions: and smaller financial institutions replacing manual processes with automated solutions.”” The report specifies that AML solutions should include customer due diligence, suspicious activity monitoring, case management and watch-list filtering ‚ all found in SAS Anti-Money Laundering.

SAS Anti-Money Laundering is part of the SAS Enterprise Financial Crimes Framework for Banking, a technology infrastructure for preventing, detecting and managing financial crimes across lines of business within today’s banks.

More than 114 institutions using SAS for anti-money laundering include: Banco de Oro Unibank (Philippines), Bank of Queensland (Australia), China Construction Bank (Hong Kong), Coastal Federal Credit Union (US), Commonwealth Bank of Australia (Australia), Development Bank Philippines (Philippines), EON Bank (Malaysia), Fubon Bank (Hong Kong), Hana Bank (Korea), Industrial Bank of Korea (Korea), Kookmin Bank (Korea), Land Bank of The Philippines (Philippines), Philippines Veterans Bank (Philippines), Samsung Securities Co. (Korea) and Sovereign Bank (US).

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