The global Anti-Money Laundering (AML) software market is expected to see an average annual growth of 9 per cent over the next few years and reach over $690 million in 2015, according to a recent industry report.

The report by the Aite group, a leading financial research and consulting firm for retail banking, payments, regulatory issues, wholesale banking, securities and investments, shows that the increased demand for AML software is being fuelled by the convergence of increasing regulation, high profile regulatory enforcement and next-gen solutions that can address both AML and fraud management needs among today’s businesses.

Also, the Aite Group has ranked SAS, the leading provider of business analytics software and services for the global market, as the top AML software provider. The SAS integrated suite of AML solutions, SAS Anti-Money Laundering,  was cited for its chief aim of helping businesses decrease regulatory risks and also key in a reduction in false positives and increase efficiencies.

The market evaluation report is based on interviews conducted among 18 global AML compliance vendors and 36 financial institutions from January to April this year. The Aite report, which is entitled, ‘Global Anti-Money Laundering Vendor Evaluation: A Reinvigorated Market,’ cites analytics, visual data integration, pre-packaged scenarios and scalability as the key strengths of SAS Anti-Money Laundering and also gives high ratings to its performance, customer service responsiveness and the ability to harness analytics that provides more effective alert processing—resulting in a massive cost savings to banks by reducing false positives and freeing investigative resources.

"SAS brings a significant amount of analytic firepower to the space, given its roots in statistical solutions," said Julie Conroy McNelley, senior analyst for retail banking practice, Aite Group. "SAS has a wide range of pre-packaged scenarios that are available with the solution, allowing for easy adjustment for financial institutions as needed. The solution's architecture is a plus for smaller institutions that don't have a data warehouse in place, as it provides the data schema for creating a data mart, and can support a number of different relational databases."

Another strong feature of SAS Anti-Money Laundering, as cited in the report, is the provision of a Teradata solution for large institutions that can process a vast amount of data in a relatively short period of time. In a proof of concept with one large client, SAS demonstrated an ability to process 2.5 billion transactions well within the allotted processing window.

The Aite group has forecasted that the current global AML software market, which is valued at $450 million, will continue to grow dramatically over the next few years.

The market drivers will include rapid growth in the Asia Pacific; the Middle East and Africa; financial institutions in the US and Europe replacing outdated solutions and smaller financial institutions replacing manual processes with automated solutions. The report specifies that AML solutions should include customer due diligence, suspicious activity monitoring, case management and watch-list filtering; key features that can be found in SAS Anti-Money Laundering.  - TradeArabia News Service