again. Having started off in Fortran, SAS was now abandoning the IBM-only PL/1 language and moving on to C (not least because there was a diminishing pool of PL/1 programmers). As hoped for, this created a software system that would run across most platforms and was the first version of SAS to run on Unix, MS-DOS and Windows. In 1988 SAS introduced the concept of multi-vendor architecture. The following year, SAS EVP, John Sall, introduced his JMP


(always pronounced ‘jump’) statistical analysis programme. This had originally been written for the Macintosh but was released for Microsoft Windows in 1993 and Linux in 2005. The software’s benefit, said SAS, lay in its dynamic linkage of statistics with graphics.


With ease of communication in mind, in 1993 SAS


introduced software for building customised executive information systems (EIS). This was based on object-oriented


Risk Management for Banking


SAS is currently selling two core financial services risk products, one for banking (SAS Risk Management for Banking) and one for insurance. The financial services product set is divided into offerings for banking, capital markets, credit unions and lenders. All solutions use the same architecture, and therefore


undergo the same core development programme, standing as they do within an integrated environment for activities such as predictive and descriptive modelling, data mining, text analytics, forecasting, optimisation, simulation and experimental design. Historically, SAS has predominantly sold its software into a


bank’s risk management function under the guise of it being ‘a toolkit’, said David Rogers, global product marketing manager for risk at SAS. The core product (Base SAS) contains the kind of statistical and modelling tools typically used in-house by a large banking operation. The bank-specific version, Rogers noted, is predominantly deployed in the quantitative analytics (quant) department where it might be used for modelling credit risk or market risk activities or, from a strategic point of view, around planning (for risk-adjusted performance measurement, for example). Today’s SAS risk offering began life around 1999 when the vendor started formally bringing together its capabilities from a risk perspective into what was known as SAS Risk Dimensions. In essence this solution, which by then could support 64-bit operation on both Windows and Unix platforms, contained a risk engine, delivering the functions of the toolset mentioned above, the analytical modelling, wrapped around the SAS Data


Integration toolset and the SAS Business Intelligence stack. Without a specific set of industry capabilities, at this point it effectively became ‘a horizontal risk management offering’ and was targeted primarily at banks, insurance companies, and energy firms (ConocoPhillips, the largest refiner in the US, was an early adopter).


Rogers noted that by the time Basel II had been initially published in 2004, a clear opportunity had arisen to standardise the offering for banking, at least in terms of the data model and the calculations performed by the solution. SAS duly offered its banking clients the Basel II guideline RWA (risk-weighted asset) calculations (or whatever specific approach they were referring to) as well as the reporting samples that sat on top in the BI stack. This was seen by SAS as a ‘global opportunity’ and its sales campaign kicked off with Europe and Australia. Each country unit within SAS was (and still is) given its own capability in terms of delivering the solution. With Basel II (and now Basel III), local jurisdiction modifications were often required over the base model, said Rogers, with ‘gaps’ often being noted in data acquisition. The gap issue seemed to play into the vendor’s hands, with its history of providing analytics tools and data-grabbing from multiple sources. SAS believed that it had a lot of pre-built capability to root out the kind of data that banks were suddenly being required to draw upon. Using the Risk Dimensions analytics environment as the core, with the bank-specific product, it started offering SAS Credit Risk Management for Banks. From the credit risk/RWA starting point, SAS clients typically added the Asset and Liability for Banking application, and then perhaps profitability calculation and firm-wide risk tools.


Risk Management Systems & Suppliers Report | www.ibsintelligence.com 125


applications development, so users could deploy blocks of pre-existing code to build new applications. By 1996, SAS had announced the web-enablement of its software and a new era of development began. Pertinent to this report, 1999 saw the arrival of the Risk Dimensions software, an end-to-end risk-management solution (see below for more detail). In the same year, SAS abandoned its MS-DOS versions ostensibly because of Y2K issues, but more likely due to lack of demand. As the new millennium arrived, SAS ported its software to Linux. Major releases are now delivered once a year for each specific solution in the SAS portfolio, with an 18-month gap between releases for the core framework.


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