Riyad Bank taps SAS to create analytic centre of excellence

To capitalise on its information assets, Saudi Arabia's Riyad Bank is building an analytic centre of excellence powered by SAS, the leader in business analytics software and services.

Already a SAS Analytics customer, the bank - one of the country's largest financial institutions - seeks to consolidate its analytical capabilities and adopt best practices to improve decision-making company-wide.

The bank's manager of the enterprise wide business intelligence competency centre is leading the new analytic centre of excellence. Analytics opens the door to generating value from the massive amounts of data owned by organisations like Riyad Bank.

Leveraging existing analytical talent and resources, the bank plans to expand analytical competency to build more advanced applications. The new analytic centre of excellence will help people in different functional or geographic areas shatter boundaries that have historically prevented collaboration. More people across the organisation will be able to deploy fact-based decisions, laying the foundation for optimisation and innovation.

"The analytic centre of excellence is a powerful tool for improving the way we serve customers," said Yassir A Al-Suwais, Manager of the Business Intelligence Competency Centre, Retail Banking Services, at Riyad Bank. "Riyad Bank is committed to providing the best possible products and services. Using SAS to align our analytical strengths to business priorities, we can achieve our customer-centric objectives in the most efficient and effective manner possible."

Riyad Bank executives are proud to promote analytics to more employees as it organises analytical talent and tools. The shared resource will benefit the entire enterprise, including retail, commercial, risk, finance, marketing, products, sales, HR and branches. With SAS Analytics, the bank expects to deliver managers a more informed view of business performance and operations, and provide employees easy access to the analytical insights that support better, faster decisions.

"Too often, organisations under-utilise some assets while overloading others," said Anne Milley, Senior Director, Analytic Strategy, Worldwide Marketing at SAS. "The analytic centre of excellence organises and engages analytical talent - assigning problems to those with just the right skills. With SAS, Riyad Bank is expanding its analytical bandwidth while helping nurture and retain valuable analytical experts."

As a first step, SAS helped the bank assess the environment and capabilities of its technology infrastructure, human capital, information and knowledge processes, and culture areas. It quickly became clear that people were the most critical resources for driving growth, reducing costs and increasing profitability. After the assessment, SAS helped develop recommendations, initiatives and a road map to achieve the desired capabilities. SAS will also support the bank during its analytics implementations, making adjustments as needed to ensure continuous improvement.

The bank pays close attention to the five pillars of successful analytic centres of excellence: 1) executive team sponsorship; 2) expertise in information technology, business domain and analytics; 3) a well-defined charter, responsibilities and support processes; 4) collaboration with all appropriate stakeholders; and 5) a focus on making analytics repeatable. Taking a strategic view, Riyad Bank will make its implementations highly visible throughout the enterprise to establish its reputation of proven results, excellent work ethics and value creation.

SAS Analytics provides an integrated environment for predictive and descriptive modelling, data mining, text analytics, model management, forecasting, optimisation, simulation, experimental design and more. SAS Analytics is part of the SAS Business Analytics Framework, backed by the industry's most comprehensive range of consulting, training and analytical services to help worldwide customers make smart decisions in the face of uncertainty.