The emergence of Anti Money Laundering (AML) technologies has helped drive in a fresh wave of demand across the global market, thereby prompting a CAGR of 9% over the next few years and reaching over USD 690 million in 2015, according to a recent industry report released by the Aite group, a financial research and consulting firm for retail banking, payments, regulatory issues, wholesale banking, securities & investments.
The report shows that the increased demand for AML software is being fuelled by the convergence of increasing regulation, high profile regulatory enforcement and next-gen solutions that can address both AML and fraud management needs among today’s businesses.
The Aite Group has also ranked SAS, a provider of business analytics software and services for the global market, as the top AML software provider. The SAS integrated suite of AML solutions, SAS Anti-Money Laundering, was cited for its chief aim of helping businesses decrease regulatory risks and also key in a reduction in false positives and increase efficiencie, according to the research group.
The market evaluation report is based on interviews conducted among 18 global AML compliance vendors and 36 financial institutions from January to April this year, the company said.
The Aite report, which is entitled, ‘Global Anti-Money Laundering Vendor Evaluation: A Reinvigorated Market,’ cites analytics, visual data integration, pre-packaged scenarios and scalability as the key strengths of SAS Anti-Money Laundering and also gives high ratings to its performance, customer service responsiveness and the ability to harness analytics that provides more effective alert processing—resulting in a massive cost savings to banks by reducing false positives and freeing investigative resources.
“SAS brings a significant amount of analytic firepower to the space, given its roots in statistical solutions,” said Julie Conroy McNelley, senior analyst for Retail Banking Practice, Aite Group. “SAS has a wide range of pre-packaged scenarios that are available with the solution, allowing for easy adjustment for financial institutions as needed. The solution’s architecture is a plus for smaller institutions that don’t have a data warehouse in place, as it provides the data schema for creating a data mart, and can support a number of different relational databases,” she added.
Another strong feature of SAS Anti-Money Laundering, as cited in the report, is the provision of a Teradata solution for large institutions that can process a vast amount of data in a relatively short period of time.
The Aite group has forecasted that the current global AML software market, which is valued at USD 450 million, will continue to grow dramatically over the next few years, The market drivers will include rapid growth in the Asia Pacific; the Middle East and Africa; financial institutions in the United States and Europe replacing outdated solutions and smaller financial institutions replacing manual processes with automated solutions.
The report specifies that AML solutions should include customer due diligence, suspicious activity monitoring, case management and watch-list filtering; key features that can be found in SAS Anti-Money Laundering.
“The Aite report has given us a comprehensive view of today’s AML segment along with what is currently being demanded by global businesses. We are humbled by the report’s move to name us as the leading provider for AML solutions for the international market. The top ranking reflects our strong commitment towards the creation and development of key AML products that can meet the requirements of our customers. We are currently witnessing an increased demand for strategic solutions that deal with money laundering, fraud and other forms of financial abuse and SAS is looking to play a major role in the AML software segment’s development by continuing on its promise of providing global businesses with solutions that can not only help reduce the occurrences of these financial crimes but also drive in more productivity and efficiency, “said Jonathon Saunders, sales director, SAS Middle East.
SAS Anti-Money Laundering is part of the SAS Enterprise Financial Crimes Framework for Banking, a technology infrastructure for preventing, detecting and managing financial crimes across lines of business within today’s banks, the company concluded.
