Sydney & Auckland, (October 25, 2007) – SAS, the leader in business intelligence, was ranked first in the "core risk technology" category and second overall in Chartis Research's RiskTech 100 report for a second consecutive year. The report, an overall market assessment of the top risk technology vendors, examined each vendor's functionality, core technology, organisational strength, customer satisfaction and market presence.

“This result confirms SAS’ position in the market as a top tier risk management vendor”, said Simon Baldock, practice manager – Risk Intelligence for SAS Australia and New Zealand. “SAS’ comprehensive risk management offering is the foundation of many Australian financial institutions’ risk management systems strategy. Our robust platform and best of breed applications will continue to move our customers towards enterprise wide risk intelligence”.

The Chartis report targeted SAS as "a required shortlist candidate for every tender, RFP [Request for Proposal] or competitive selection process for enterprise risk technology in the financial services industry". The report reiterated "SAS' ... key strength is its superior data management and risk analytics capabilities, providing the ability to offer a true end-to-end solution".

While Chartis highlights both SAS(r) Credit Risk Management for Banking and SAS OpRisk Management as software market leaders, SAS also provides offerings that address market risk, fraud, anti-money laundering, actuarial risk and energy risk.

The RiskTech 100 core technology category examined each vendor's capabilities in data management, risk analytics and reporting. With SAS' "'best-in-class' core technology," Chartis noted that due to "the data intensive nature of risk management, and the requirements for complex statistical calculations .... SAS has had a competitive advantage over some of the generic enterprise technology and specialist firms". Again, SAS was highlighted as "very strong in the areas of data integration, data storage for analytics and data quality management."

In risk analytics, Chartis called SAS an "industry leader in performing complex analysis of large amounts of data”, with SAS' "optimisation routines and data handling capabilities ... [providing] superior performance (time and cost) over most of its competitors".

For reporting technology, Chartis again recognised that "SAS' business intelligence (BI) capabilities provide a flexible environment for customers to define and generate risk measurement and monitoring information" which "facilitate a two-way interaction between users and systems allowing for risk diagnostics, scenario analysis and key risk indicator monitoring."

SAS has received several honours and awards for its risk intelligence solutions over the past year. Most recently, Chartis Research positioned SAS as an established leader in its "Credit Risk Management Systems 2007" report. Also, Chartis ranked SAS software as the leader in operational risk management for a third consecutive year. In June, SAS OpRisk Management was named as a first-place recipient in the OpRisk & Compliance magazine's First Annual Compliance Software Ranking. Also, Risk Magazine, a leading global financial risk management publication, selected SAS Risk Intelligence as its 2007 software product of the year in January.

Currently, more than 200 financial services institutions use SAS(r) for credit risk and operational risk management, including: Bankdata (Denmark), BB&T (USA), Caisse Nationale des Caisses d'Epargne (France), Commerzbank (Germany), Grupo Santander (Spain), HSBC (UK), HypoVereinsbank (Germany), Kookmin Bank (Korea), Landsbanki (Iceland), Raiffeisen Zentralbank (Austria), Volkskreditbank AG (Austria), Vseobecna Uverova Banka (Slovakia) and Woori Bank (Korea).

To download the full RiskTech 100 report for free, please visit www.chartis-research.com.