SAS Anti-Money Laundering Enhancements Identify High-Risk Customers Better, Quicker; World-Check Integration Seamlessly Identifies High-Risk Entities.

CARY, N.C. -- SAS(R), the leader in business intelligence, today announced enhancements to its anti-money laundering solution that will enable financial institutions to more quickly pinpoint high-risk persons and entities while taking appropriate actions to mitigate risks. These enhancements are a result of an agreement and integration with World-Check, which identifies individuals and businesses from over 230 countries that are known to represent a money laundering, compliance or reputational risk.

Financial institutions that use the improved, integrated SAS(R) Anti-Money Laundering solution can automatically screen their customers against World-Check's database of known high-risk individuals and businesses. The World-Check database includes known money launderers, fraudsters, Politically Exposed Persons (PEPs), terrorists, organized crime syndicates, shell financial institutions and their beneficial owners, sanctioned entities and a dozen other high-risk categories from over 230 countries and territories. The database is derived from over 140,000 public sources and is updated daily. World-Check tracks and creates profiles for such entities and gathers information on their relationship network - the people and companies that are reported to be associated with each entry in the database.

RBC Financial Group (RBC) is an early adopter of SAS' data matching capabilities combined with World-Check's data. The bank has automated the process of screening its customer names against the World-Check database. "At RBC, we are committed to ensuring compliance with our legal obligations under relevant anti-terrorism legislation, while respecting the privacy rights of our clients," said Karim Rajwani, enterprise designated anti-money laundering officer, RBC Financial Group. "To do this we have assembled a professional team to manage our screening processes and implemented best-in-class technological solutions to make our screening processes more efficient and to provide quality data to assist in that screening."

To facilitate the matching process, SAS uses the latest technology from DataFlux(R), a SAS subsidiary, to parse, cleanse and standardize customer data and the World-Check database. The customizable DataFlux(R) matching technology takes into account misspellings, nicknames, transpositions, language-sensitive derivation and other common errors and omissions that may thwart traditional matching techniques.

"This identification capability helps our anti-money laundering customers comply with certain regulatory requirements, such as the 'Enhanced Due Diligence' provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act," said Mark Moorman, vice president of SAS financial services practice. "The SAS Anti-Money Laundering enhancements are yet another example of SAS' commitment to our customers in addressing specific compliance needs."

Using the combined SAS and World-Check capabilities, financial institutions can filter against the database in its entirety, or they can harness several prebuilt SAS matching scenarios on subsets of the World-Check database, including Financial Action Task Force list of Non-Cooperative Countries and Territories, terrorists, PEPs, and a general high-risk category.

About World-Check

World-Check serves more than 770 institutions, including many regulatory and government agencies in over 65 countries, with its global list of heightened-risk individuals and organizations. World-Check assists institutions in mitigating reputational, financial and compliance risk by monitoring and correlating risk-related information on high-risk entities. Financial institutions can therefore very efficiently screen their new and existing customers for risk on a routine basis. Recognized as an industry pioneer, World-Check has revolutionized and "standardized" global Know Your Customer (KYC) and PEP screening. For more information, please visit www.world-check.com.

About SAS

SAS is the market leader in providing a new generation of business intelligence software and services that create true enterprise intelligence. SAS solutions are used at more than 40,000 sites - including 96 of the top 100 companies on the FORTUNE Global 500(R) - to develop more profitable relationships with customers and suppliers; to enable better, more accurate and informed decisions; and to drive organizations forward. SAS is the only vendor that completely integrates leading data warehousing, analytics and traditional BI applications to create intelligence from massive amounts of data. For nearly three decades, SAS has been giving customers around the world The Power to Know(R). Visit us at www.sas.com.

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Copyright (C) 2004 SAS Institute Inc. Cary, NC, USA. All rights reserved.