ABSA Group Limited - 2025 Customer Recognition Awards: Innovative Problem Solver

[SAS_Innovate]

ABSA Group Limited

Contact: Parvesh Chauhan

Country:  South Africa

Award Category: Innovative Problem Solver

Tell us about the business problem you were trying to solve.

ABSA has regional operations, subsidiaries in 10 markets in Africa and as first line support to business in terms of managing Fraud and Financial crime across all our markets we needed to ensure that we prevent Fraud on our customers, enhance our control environment and ensure that ABSA bank is not used as channel to fund financial crime activities. Furthermore, we also needed to ensure that we deliver on the mandate specified by different regulators in terms of managing our customers and their transactions and report to regulators around specific requirements set from time to time.

What SAS products did you use and how did you use them?

We used SAS foundational products specifically the fundamental SAS Enterprise guide (which is set Enterprise wide) which forms core of many SAS solutions.

What were the results or outcomes?

With the power and ability of SAS to connect to different platforms and databases, crunch through volumes of transactional data with complex business rules we have been able to fine tune our strategies across the different platforms which we use to mitigate Fraud and Financial Crime Risks and create huge efficiencies in the effective use of our platforms to deliver seamless services to our customers and minimize customer friction. Some stats from our work this year using the SAS Platform is follows:

• Introduced analytics and data driven strategies – all processed through SAS to ensure that we have a reduction of 49% Fraud cases between Jan24’ and Dec’24. Reduction in Fraud cases means more operational efficiency (less cases to investigate and less customer friction and effective Fraud prevention. Due to reduction on Fraud cases, our service level agreements case investigations improved to 99% which provides us with a competitive advantage to manage our customers more effectively and deal with Fraud matters.
• Analytics driven approach through SAS models led to us fine tune our strategies which led to a prevention more than ZAR50 million on our card portfolio, which was an increase of around 171% compared to the previous year.
• The False positive ratio on our fraud alerts generated by systems improved by 73%, enabling us to be more effective in mitigating Fraud risk with improved customer experience.
• Developed Internal Fraud models on SAS Platform which led to our internal Fraud case volume reduce by 91% and had our first of prevention of ZAR35k which if undetected could have resulted in a significant loss.
• Created a single view of customer using SAS to gather customer data from various core banking platforms, which led us to descope customer from our annual Know Your Customer Refresh program, resulting a effort saving of around ZAR7 Million.
• Regulators introduced stringent reporting requirements from time to time in our various markets and using SAS platform we were able to meet those requirements in a short space of time compared to our peers. This prevents the bank from potential fines and helps the regulators to manage the risks in financial eco system for a market.
• Ability of SAS process to be automated relieves my teams’ efforts to focus on ever evolving thread of Fraud and Financial crime in our markets.

Why is this approach innovative?

Though we use the standard SAS foundational software and as a bank we constantly evolve with new products, digitization, new solutions, new infrastructure and also evolving risk landscape, we use SAS creatively to harness information from internal and external platforms, transform large volumes of data in short space of time, analyze and customize our models and strategies to specific business needs deliver business value – makes the use of SAS solution and this approach innovative.