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By Laton McCartney
Thanks in part to Basel II regulations, SAS, the Cary, N.C. based business analytics software and services provider, and the largest independent vendor in the business intelligence market, has signed agreements in the past few weeks with several major banks.
On June 8, the Karachi, Pakistan based Allied Bank entered into an agreement with SAS, to establish an enterprisewide risk framework to help meet regulatory requirements such as Basel II, enhance its credit ratings and build up the bank's consumer portfolio.
"Allied Bank strives to adopt the latest advancements in an ever-changing technological environment. In line with our technological upgrade plans, we are delighted to initiate the process of deploying a suite of risk management solutions from one of the leading global firms, SAS," said Mohammad Aftab Manzoor, CEO of Allied Bank in a prepared statement.
The solution is a cutting-edge analytical tool for risk management, customer segmentation and behavioral scoring to help meet the sophisticated data management and reporting requirements under Basel II. In addition to complying with Basel II regulation, banks are looking for ways to also achieve business benefits within a comprehensive risk management program.
Allied Bank chose a combination of SAS Customer Intelligence and SAS for Enterprise Risk Management solutions as well as SAS Enterprise BI Server. With SAS, the bank will have an enhanced automated reporting system which will enable it to launch and manage more consumer products in less time and reduce overall costs. The system will help the bank to retain current customers and acquire new ones.
Compliance with Basel II regulation has also behind Union Bank's decision to select SAS, to help manage risk more efficiently and profitably. When Union Bank needed to comply with Basel II, the organization determined that SAS Credit Scoring for Banking could help generate, deploy, validate and monitor critical risk models in an integrated, auditable and flexible platform, the bank says.
"SAS offered very powerful modeling capabilities and came highly recommended by other banks," said Hans Helbekkmo, Senior Vice President of Enterprise Wide Risk, Union Bank. "With SAS in place, Union Bank will have better consistency, efficiency and transparency in regards to its risk management program. Our project risk is significantly reduced since the program is now standardized on one solution."
Headquartered in San Francisco, Union Bank is the primary a subsidiary of UnionBanCal Corporation, a financial holding company with assets of $68.7 billion as of March 31, 2009.
"Basel II is driving many of these agreements," says SAS spokeswoman Kris Balic. "But this isn't a surge. We are continually entering into these kinds of agreements as banks seek to comply."
Balic says SAS has begun working with numerous banks in recent months on Basel II initiatives, but those financial institutions have chosen not to announce the agreements publicly. Basel II, is an international standard that banking regulators can use when creating regulations about how much capital banks need to put aside to guard against the types of financial and operational risks banks face.
In other areas, HSBC has just chosen SAS Fraud Management, the real-time fraud detection system and part of the SAS Fraud Framework, as its principal solution for fraud management across its global network. HSBC and SAS are working together to expand SAS Fraud Management's capabilities, beyond protecting against credit and debit card fraud, to provide a comprehensive approach to combating fraud across multiple lines of business and channels.
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