Pakistan's Allied Bank has signed for risk management technology from SAS to help it meet Basel II regulatory requirements and improve credit ratings.
The bank will roll out SAS's customer intelligence and enterprise risk management systems as well as an enterprise business intelligence server.
The vendor says its technology will provide Allied with an enhanced automated reporting system which will enable it to launch and manage more consumer products in less time and reduce overall costs.
In addition, the risk management, customer segmentation and behavioural scoring technology will help Allied Bank meet data management and reporting requirements under Basel II.
Commenting on the technology, Fareed Vardag, chief risk officer, Allied Bank, says: "It offers a fully integrated solution that houses both risk and consumer solutions driven by extensive analytics. We, therefore, anticipate a quick return on our investment and an overall low cost of ownership."
Meanwhile, a survey of 111 financial services firms around the world from Deloitte suggests many still have work ahead of them in their risk management efforts.
Deloitte says institutions may have significant work to do to upgrade their IT risk management infrastructure. Just half of respondents are extremely or very satisfied with the capabilities of their risk systems to provide the information needed to manage market and credit risk. In other areas, such as liquidity risk and operational risk, only 40% or fewer provided ratings this high.
Nearly half of respondents say a lack of integration among risk systems is a major concern, with a further 40% citing it as a minor worry. About a third say a lack of flexibility to extend current systems is a major worry, with a further 51% indicating it is a minor concern.
In addition, 84% cite their inability to integrate risk analytics as either a major or minor concern. Nearly a third consider the high cost of maintenance and vendor fees a major concern, while an inability to source the required functionality from one provider worries 18%.
The survey also reveals that only 36% of firms questioned have an enterprise risk management programme, although another 23% are in the process of creating one. Even among institutions with $100 billion or more in assets, just 58% have an ERM programme already in place.
Furthermore, despite regulators calling for financial services firms to independently validate risk-related models, only 53% of respondents have such a function and of those that do not, over two thirds have no plans to create one.