Subscribe
About

Northwest Federal Credit Union fights financial crime with SAS

Financial co-operative saves time while stopping criminals with SAS Anti-Money Laundering.

With fraud and financial crimes plaguing both small and large organisations alike, banking institutions of all sizes require technology to help stay ahead of criminals.

Northwest Federal Credit Union (NWFCU) - a not-for-profit financial co-operative of 105 000 members, with assets in excess of $2 billion and five branch offices in northern Virginia and Washington, DC - uses SAS Anti-Money Laundering, part of the SAS Enterprise Financial Crimes Framework for Banking from the leader in business analytics software and services, to focus on fraud prevention and combat fraud on behalf of its membership.

"SAS Anti-Money Laundering has definitely been a huge asset for us from a process and efficiency standpoint; it's really made a world of difference," said Nancy Huntoon, Security and Fraud Manager and Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) Compliance Officer at NWFCU.

In the past, NWFCU had to generate a number of transactional reports containing a large volume of detail each day and then manually comb through each transaction to identify possible suspicious activity. Now, Huntooon explained: "SAS crunches all the data and readily provides the fraud and money laundering scenarios and risk factors upfront. It's helped us with time management by identifying fraudulent activity so we can focus more accurately on suspicious alerts. Our BSA Specialist can effectively review the new alerts and move on as compared to the previous process, which might have taken more than a day to just work through the large volume of transactional data."

NWFCU monitors a wide variety of fraud scenarios and risk factors - such as large cash withdrawals and deposits, wire transfers, the velocity of debit card activity and money structuring. The pre-defined scenarios and factors in the SAS solution helped the credit union adapt quickly to the new system.

"We didn't exactly know where to start in analysing our transactions, so we took the scenarios out of the box to start," said Huntoon. "From the standpoint of pinpointing certain activities, it helps us define what we need to look at, and how to categorise each activity. SAS has made it easier to target more indicators that we may not have seen before - it takes a lot of the guesswork from the process and helps us catch things earlier to prevent potential fraud losses."

To build upon the credit union's financial crimes capacity, Huntoon and her team are also building a house holding process to analyse the relationships between member accounts, and the money that moves between them, to identify suspicious activity.

"The flexibility of SAS allows you to synthesise your analysis of transactions and prevent potential fraud," said Huntoon. "I like SAS' customer support structure and availability. SAS was the best fit overall - from service to install to the actual application. The solution had most of what we needed; if it wasn't available it was certainly programmable."

Share

SAS

SAS is the leader in business analytics software and services, and the largest independent vendor in the business intelligence market. Through innovative solutions delivered within an integrated framework, SAS helps customers at more than 50 000 sites improve performance and deliver value by making better decisions faster. Since 1976, SAS has been giving customers around the world 'The Power to Know'. http://www.sas.com and http://www.sas.com/sa

SAS and all other SAS Institute Inc. product or service names are registered trademarks or trademarks of SAS Institute Inc. in the USA and other countries. (R) indicates USA registration. Other brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies. Copyright (c) 2009 SAS Institute Inc. All rights reserved.

Editorial contacts