Money launderers aren't the only ones watching the banks. With the clock ticking at four years and counting since 11 September 2001, global lawmakers are also turning a keen eye toward financial institutions of all sizes.

While larger banks might have had the most pressure to quickly comply with global regulations to implement anti-money laundering systems, the time has come for all banks to comply.

With the recent announcement of SAS Money Laundering Detection, SAS, the leader in business intelligence, can now address these concerns by delivering its enterprise-class anti-money laundering methodology in a solution tailored to small and mid-sized banking and financial institutions.

"The new solution helps smaller financial institutions comply with government money laundering regulations by supporting automated processes for detection, investigation and reporting," said David Stewart, director of SAS' anti-money laundering program.

"We live in a different world from the one before 11 September 2001, and amendments to anti-money laundering regulations across the globe require financial services companies to step up their efforts to detect suspicious activity."

SAS Money Laundering Detection includes data management tools and best practices, an alert engine, basic reporting functionality, transaction monitoring, analytics and administration. All of this is available in a simplified technology architecture that institutions can easily integrate with other SAS solutions and migrate to a more sophisticated money laundering solution as needed.

"Regional and community banks are now looking to build an enterprise-wide view of their growing organisations, and SAS Money Laundering Detection gives those banks the capability for high-end monitoring at a reasonable cost," said Mark Moorman, vice-president of SAS financial services practice.

"By making our enterprise AML technology available to them in a fiscally responsible way, SAS can help them do more at a lower cost. It has all of the processing of SAS Anti-Money Laundering delivered in a simplified technology."

SAS Money Laundering Detection will help financial institutions:

• Establish consistent process, procedures and controls for identifying suspicious behaviour and filing necessary reports;
• Document the decision process for regulatory review;
• Conduct investigations using existing staff, and
• Implement a money laundering detection system quickly, even if they don't have a lot of financial or human resources to do so.

SAS Anti-Money Laundering
SAS Anti-Money Laundering is a sophisticated anti-money laundering solution that can take mountains of information from all areas of a financial business, manage and refine that information, and turn it into usable knowledge that will help that business automatically identify and classify suspicious behaviour. It can help banks meet stringent government regulations, protect shareholder confidence and maintain a strong reputation. The solution offers an integrated and open-ended architecture that lets banks gather information across data sources, transform the appropriate data into usable knowledge, detect suspicious activity and accurately alert investigators and authorities.