The company's strong performance continues into 2006 as it reports its hundredth Basel II customer in the same region.

SAS' financial services and insurance offerings contributed 40 percent to SAS' $1.68 billion overall revenue for 2005. Customers such as Grupo Santander (Spain), Commerzbank, Hypovereinsbank, (both Germany), Landsbanki (Iceland), Bankdata (Denmark), Barclays (UK), BB&T (USA), and Vseobecna Uverova Banka (Slovak Republic) are customers who have selected SAS.

"A major contributor to SAS' growth in the financial services industry has been our success in winning Basel II projects," Ian Manocha, General Manager, Financial Services, SAS EMEA said at the company's 24 th annual SAS Forum International business intelligence conference. "The number of these projects validate that financial institutions recognise the depth and breadth of SAS' banking and insurance intelligence solutions." SAS' intelligence solutions cover financial, customer, operational and risk management.

Another area in which SAS is gaining customer momentum is the automotive financial services sector. Six tier-one players from this industry selected the SAS credit risk solution in order to comply with Basel II.

SAS continues its business momentum in the financial services industry by unveiling new and enhanced solutions that will help financial institutions and insurers combat money laundering, improve risk management and identify new revenue streams with customer intelligence.

At SAS Forum International the BI vendor announced new components and enhancements to its industry-specific packaged applications known as SAS Banking and SAS Insurance Intelligence Solutions:

• SAS Credit Risk Management for Banking now includes a sophisticated, common risk reporting repository to support regulatory reporting requirements. This flexible model allows banks to consistently support multi-jurisdictional regulatory reporting as well as internal reporting requirements.
  
• SAS Credit Scoring for Banking has also been updated to provide comprehensive rating model validation reports that are fully in line with recent suggestions made by the Basel II committee.
  
• SAS Cross-Sell and Up-Sell for Banking supports several products and lines of business, such as credit cards, deposits, loans, mortgages, investments, online banking and retirement services. The solution uses analytics to identify the next most likely product the customer would be most interested in based on historical and behaviour based information.
  
• SAS Customer Segmentation for Banking helps banks easily develop and manage sophisticated customer segments faster and at a lower cost.
  
• The latest version of SAS Customer Retention for Banking extends retention analysis into other banking lines of business, such as credit cards, mortgages, deposits and loans.

Another area in which SAS is making progress is within its insurance intelligence offering:

• SAS Customer Lifetime Value for Insurance produces an individual customer's lifetime financial value. This value is derived by considering profits from current and predicted future holdings and then forecasting their value over a defined period of time. It allows insurers to make the right decisions when setting priorities for servicing activities, thus driving retention and cross-selling and up-selling initiatives.
  
• SAS Ratemaking for Insurance is designed to help insurers review, create and modify rate structures using advanced analytics. The solution is built on SAS' Insurance Intelligence Architecture, which provides a robust insurance data model for efficient data storage and pre-built data flows, quickly generating rates based on past experiences and predicted future risks.
  
• SAS Operational Risk helps organisations mitigate operational risk across the enterprise and now has been updated with risk and control self assessments, improved dimensional management, more powerful scenario analysis, enhanced key risk indicators and better integrated reporting.

Customers in the insurance industry include Chubb (UK), Allianz Portugal and Gerling (Germany).

SAS and HSBC Holdings plc, one of the world's largest plastic card issuers, are demonstrating industry thought leadership by developing a new real-time fraud detection platform. Both companies have been working closely together in order to go live later in 2006. HSBC will be describing the project in more detail at SAS Forum International. In July 2005, SAS and HSBC announced a long-term partnership to transform the payment card fraud-detection market.