Strategic Use of the SAS System in Banking

As the banking industry continues its trend of record breaking mergers and acquisitions, the systems that provide these companies with critical business information become more complex. The focus has turned from product and branch performance to understanding and predicting behaviors of individual customers. This customer centric approach has created the need for business units within the bank to look at new levels of detail in the corporate data store. In turn, Information Technology (IT) groups must respond to the demand by capturing more detailed information from operational systems and make it available in an understandable format that supports this new focus. The SAS system is used strategically throughout the banking industry for numerous applications from CPU performance in the data center to financial reporting and consolidation for executives. This paper will focus on the data warehousing and data mining initiatives that support the customer focused approach to doing business.