SAS Fights Money Laundering With New Solution, Practice

Builds on 26 years of experience to address industry-specific needs, from money laundering and fraud to enterprise risk management and marketing automation

CARY, N.C., Oct. 1, 2002 -- SAS, the leader in business intelligence, today demonstrated its strong commitment to meeting the specific needs of the financial services industry with the announcements of a new anti-money laundering solution and the creation of a financial services practice.

With the anti-money laundering solution from SAS, financial institutions can detect and report criminal financial activities more effectively, thus reducing risk, meeting government regulations, and protecting shareholder and consumer confidence. SAS provides organizations with the ability to refine detection measures and logic to more accurately report exceptions throughout the enterprise. The capability to "tune" the solution increases detection rates while reducing the number of false positives.

"SAS has a very impressive anti-money laundering solution," said Alan Yong, research director, financial analytics for Aberdeen Group. "The comprehensive offering, built on SAS' leading analytical and data management technology, is a strategic application and a framework that can be tuned to satisfying other needs of financial services organizations such as fraud and customer relationship management."

The SAS solution

The anti-money laundering solution from SAS addresses an enterprisewide risk management need in the financial services industry. The solution, built on a banking-specific, integrated and open-ended architecture, can gather information from different data sources, transform the appropriate data into useable knowledge, identify potential money laundering activity and report on the results. The solution allows customers to modify and prioritize anti-money laundering detection logic. Organizations can use customized logic to track scores of suspicious transactions across many business units. Powerful and scalable advanced analytical models provide the intelligence to constantly refine existing business rules and to discover new ones to increase the accuracy of the automatic detection engine. Analytics can also help weigh the severity of rules violations and rank suspicious behavior, enabling more effective investigation efforts. Customer details are constantly reviewed against suspected criminals `hot lists' issued by law enforcement agencies and other public information on suspicious organizations and individuals through regular crosschecking of the customer base, new customer files, and updated customer records.

New SAS practice

The new SAS Financial Services Practice will deliver software solutions that address the critical needs of banks (retail and commercial) and asset management firms (retail and institutional), as well as card services, wealth management and insurance companies. These needs range from combating fraud and money laundering to managing enterprise risk and improving marketing efforts.

"Financial services organizations look to SAS for business solutions because of our unmatched technology, our more than a quarter century of leadership and our stability and customer focus," said Mark Moorman, vice president of the financial services practice. "With our financial services team, which includes pre-sales and integration support, we will ensure our customers' success through focused business solutions and world-class expertise."

The practice will draw from resources globally to benefit financial institutions worldwide. The focused team puts SAS' 26 years of experience in the financial services industry to work, helping organizations maximize their customer, supplier and operational data by turning it into intelligence for more timely, accurate and profitable business decisions.

"Creating this practice is an important step in our evolution to solving unique pains in specific industries - a strategy previously emphasized with the announcement of our industry intelligence solutions," said Dr. Jim Goodnight, CEO of SAS. "With this focus, we will better serve financial services customers who are under enormous competitive and regulatory pressures. They need to do more with less, create effective marketing campaigns, build lasting and profitable relationships with customers, detect fraud and adhere to new regulations, such as the new anti-money-laundering requirements of the USA PATRIOT Act."

26 years of experience in financial services

SAS' industry expertise is evidenced by long-term relationships with top financial customers including AXA Financial, Barclay's, Dreyfus, Hang Seng Bank, ING Bank, and U.S. Bancorp. In the banking industry alone, SAS works with 1,100 banks worldwide, including 61 of the 62 banks listed in the Fortune Global 500. Furthermore, financial services is SAS' largest industry segment by revenue, contributing 25 percent in 2001.

Unity Trust Bank (www.unity.uk.com), a UK-based bank serving credit and trade unions, charities and other social enterprises, relies on SAS to detect anti-money laundering, recognizing SAS' strengths in this area. "Like all banks, we are at risk from fraudsters and launderers but we wanted to be able to assure our customers that we are taking every measure possible for a bank of our size to combat this," said Jeremy Wagg, director of marketing for Unity Trust Bank. "SAS has given us this capability, making Unity Trust Bank a leader in its sector."

About SAS

SAS is the market leader in providing a new generation of business intelligence software and services that create true enterprise intelligence. SAS solutions are used at more than 38,000 sites - including 98 of the top 100 businesses on the Fortune 500 - to develop more profitable relationships with customers and suppliers; to enable better, more accurate and informed decisions; and to drive organizations forward. SAS is the only vendor that completely integrates leading data warehousing, analytics and traditional BI applications to create intelligence from massive amounts of data. For more than 25 years, SAS has been giving customers around the world The Power to Know(R). Visit us at www.sas.com.

SAS and all other SAS Institute Inc. product or service names are registered trademarks or trademarks of SAS Institute Inc. in the USA and other countries.(R)indicates USA registration. Copyright(c)2002 SAS Institute Inc. Cary, NC, USA. Other brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies.

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CONTACT: SAS, Cary 
Kris Balic or Mike Nemecek, 919/531-0624 or 5140 
Kris.Balic@sas.com or Mike.Nemecek@sas.com 
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