At its business leaders conference last month, SAS announced the launch of two new products: SAS Stress Testing solution suite and SAS CyberSecurity.

Banks must balance the rigors of prepping for “major exams"—such as the scheduled stress tests overseen by the U.S. Federal Reserve and European Banking Authority—with readiness for a “pop quiz,” meaning any ad-hoc risk scenario regulators, the market or executive management may raise. Financial institutions that want to be fully prepared for all scenarios can turn to the new SAS Stress Testing solution suite.

Now generally available to the market, the SAS Stress Testing suite is designed around three comprehensive and complementary offerings: SAS Stress Testing Workbench, SAS Risk Modeling Workbench, and SAS Model Implementation Platform.

Stress test orchestration. Regulations require stress testing processes to cover the entire enterprise. Without proper governance and management at an enterprise level, an organization could spend as much time auditing the integrity of its stress testing results as obtaining the data and calculations.

SAS Stress Testing Workbench makes consolidating results across risk, treasury and finance departments efficient and transparent. Through its web-based environment, analysts can manage the overall stress testing process via a central hub. Analysts can review and execute models, aggregate results, integrate other data sources and apply business, regulatory and accounting rules to financial statements. The interface and controls also provide auditability, transparency and repeatability.

Controlled model development. It’s not news that regulatory requirements, markets and portfolios shift over time. This means banks need to continually develop and configure new models. And this requires significant flexibility, collaboration and documentation – difficult at best when dealing with legacy systems and processes. For some financial institutions, it can take a specialized workforce of developers up to a year to develop, calibrate and test these complex models.

SAS Risk Modeling Workbench helps banks establish a sound model-development process that stands up to regulatory scrutiny. Within its visual environment, analysts can develop, validate and calibrate the various risk models needed for stress testing.

Efficient model implementation. Regulatory stress testing and real-world market shocks demand that banks always have the ability to rapidly change and execute multiple types and forms of models. It is critical to have a central and controlled environment where models can be implemented quickly and efficiently.

The SAS Model Implementation Platform speeds modeling execution, while providing a linked inventory of risk models. It uses the SAS High-Performance Risk engine, which delivers fast and efficient integration of a wide range of risk models. Models can run in production without recoding.

SAS Cybersecurity

SAS Cybersecurity helps organizations wield their information advantage over attackers to protect valuable corporate assets. When an organization effectively monitors and analyzes all its network activity and understands the business context of how a machine should behave, cyber attackers’ behavior will stand out as suspicious or unusual compared to normal network activity.

SAS Cybersecurity helps organizations to do just that. SAS Cybersecurity helps companies quickly process and analyze the big data of machine-to-machine interactions on the network. Actively streaming and continuously evaluating these interactions compared to peer norms enables organizations to detect anomalies sooner and prevent attackers from gaining a foothold.

The new software will be generally available for purchase on Nov. 16.

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