SAS Anti-Money Laundering Solution for a Global Bank

A leading fortune 50 banking group needed to implement SAS Anti-Money Laundering (AML) solution for monitoring transactions for illicit activity in order to comply with anti-money laundering and counter terrorist financing (CTF) regulations.

All transactions were pulled daily from the various source systems and loaded in the SAS AML solution. Every month the alert generation process is run to identify suspicious transactions for investigation. The challenges that the customer faced were twofold: The SLAs around availability were not being met and there were  critical security loopholes that needed to be addressed immediately.

The SAS Anti-Money Laundering solution was deployed on multiple environments in a multi-tier deployment. As designed, the system was very unstable and often unavailable to the business for operations. Excessive downtime along with some critical security vulnerabilities made the system unusable.

Additionally, the business didn’t have enough insights into the data because key reports were unavailable. A resource deficit resulted in minimal insight into the data.

Stratacent took over the support of the entire SAS AML environment and improved the availability SLA, while simultaneously resolving security vulnerabilities.

Stratacent’s team of administrators and data visualization experts took over the support of all the AML, SAS DQ, SAS VA environments as well as for all third-party software.  First, they assessed all the environments across the entire software stack. As part of the assessment all the required solution fixes were identified and applied to ensure and improve the environment stability. The team ensured that all the third-party software was also upgraded to the current and recommended versions.

The next part of the engagement was to fix all the security-related vulnerabilities related to data access and third party software. Based on the assessment outcome, proper data access was set up in concurrence with the business and IT teams. This ensured that all unauthorized access to data and systems were blocked to make all the environments secure.

The next phase involved developing reports using SAS Visual Analytics to provide the required data insights to the business teams. This helped them assess the underlying data and alerts to further fine tune the scenarios and thresholds. The number of false positives were reduces, which enhanced the overall efficiency of the solution and related processes.

Finally, a process was set up to extract the required data for the downstream systems for their consumption. This entire process was then automated to run end to end seamlessly to ensure that the environment is available without the need of  any manual intervention. This has helped in improving the systems availability.

The Stratacent team, along with SAS Education, has trained internal users with training sessions and documentation.

As a result of the engagement the customer has achieved a significantly higher availability and improvement on their SLAs. All the security-related vulnerabilities have been resolved, which has made the system and the data more secure. The business teams now have improved insights in the data through the various reports that have been developed using SAS Visual Analytics. These solutions helped the customer to improve their regulatory compliance and reduce the cost of non-compliance.