SAS is a category leader in Chartis’ Anti-Money Laundering Solutions 2013 RiskTech Quadrant report. The leader in business analytics was recognised for “completeness of offering” and “market-share potential”.
“Successful vendors have used their deep domain expertise in financial crime and operational risk to drive innovation in their AML solutions,” said Peyman Mestchian, Managing Partner at Chartis. “As well as having greater capabilities for integrating AML solutions with enterprise fraud and operational risk systems, they have used their investments in areas such as artificial intelligence, real-time data management and analytics to improve their AML systems. SAS has demonstrated this innovation through recently announced integrated fraud and financial crimes solution suites and embedding high-performance analytics in its anti-money laundering solution.”
The report noted the convergence of anti-money laundering and fraud which, fuelled by regulatory pressures, Chartis anticipates will only increase. It states: “The common ground between the two areas of financial crime means that detection analytics can be shared to deliver information to the investigative teams, which can remain separate, but aligned.” A common risk-based approach, says Chartis, will help organisations “focus on where they are most at risk, increasing efficiency and detection rates.”
Sophisticated analytics technology, according to the report, will help financial institutions balance customer convenience with money-laundering detection and prevention by reducing false positives. SAS Anti-Money Laundering‘s unique predictive analytics improve alert quality while minimising false positives. This more accurately escalates alerts to be investigated, allowing investigators to focus on the most egregious risks and reducing model governance costs.
With the continued growth of Internet and mobile banking, the volume of transactions will continue to increase. Chartis explained that “AML is fundamentally a scale-focused discipline”. To keep up, financial institutions “must upgrade their systems to ensure that transactions are well-monitored”. SAS’ detection approach automates risk classification so risk-ranks alerts are based on every customer transaction across every account, and all supporting data is available.
The Chartis report, which lauded SAS’ risk technology growth of 23 per cent in 2012, describes the data model in SAS Anti-Money Laundering as “optimised for AML analysis”. It further highlighted the ability to combine rules-based scenarios with behavioural analytics to detect more transaction types.
Chartis complimented the comprehensive case management in SAS Anti-Money Laundering’s investigation user interface and its ability to provide a complete audit trail through comments, attachments and automated regulatory filing.
“SAS Anti-Money Laundering provides a cross-channel view of financial crimes risk to speed up the investigative process and generates high-quality alerts for more effective investigations,” said Ellen Joyner, Global Marketing Principal for SAS Security Intelligence.
SAS Anti-Money Laundering is part of the SAS Financial Crimes Suite, a technology infrastructure for preventing, detecting and managing fraud and financial crimes across lines of business within today’s banks. SAS Financial Crimes Suite offers a common analytics platform and module-based solutions that provide solid protection against financial crimes by improving detection and prevention.
In January 2013, SAS Enterprise GRC appeared in the leaders’ category of Chartis Research’s GRC Solutions 2012 report and in March, SAS OpRisk Management was a leader in Chartis Research’s Operational Risk Management Systems for Financial Services 2013 report.
