SAS has announced an anti-money laundering contract win with US bank holding company BB&T Corporation, and advanced plans to develop a raft of business-specific financial compliance solutions, beginning with the launch of a new broker surveillance module.
An SAS customer since 1991, BB&T will be using the vendor's Anti-Money Laundering package to achieve compliance with the USA Patriot Act and extend the detection technology to track fraud. The enterprise wide SAS software uses predictive modelling to track all customer transactions across all products, channels and lines of business.
Phil Koonce, manager of operational risk at BB&T, says the firm selected SAS because of the functional compatibility of the software and the ability to customise the technical architecture. He says the firm was also attracted by SAS' "high investment (25% of total revenues) in research and development".
In a related announcement, the business intelleigence vendor has launched SAS Broker Surveillance which is designed to address the need for analysis and monitoring of sales practices and trading compliance. It combines data management and data mining technology with heuristic scenarios to uncover rules violations and identify suspect activity.
Broker Surveillance is the second in a planned series of compliance solutions - after anti-money laundering - aimed at helping banks and other financial institutions meet new regulatory requirements.
SAS says it is also developing an application to address lending regulations that will help financial institutions meet the requirements of legislation such as the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act in the US. A generic fraud detection package is also in the pipeline. Both will be made available in 2004.