SAS Risk Management for Insurance

SAS is one of very few companies that can provide both the data governance and risk management capabilities necessary to support a Solvency II solution. Of course, you could implement either part of this solution separately but addressing the whole problem with technology and support from a single vendor is likely to prove a winning combination.

SAS in general has a wide customer base across all industry sectors but, of course, we are here concerned with the insurance sector. Here, as well as in other markets, the company tends to focus on the largest companies.

Overall, SAS has thousands of customers. Relatively few Solvency II case studies are listed on the SAS web site but we suspect (actually we know) that this as much to do with organisations not wanting their names to be known as anything else. It is also a result of these case studies being specifically linked to the company’s risk management solution and not also to its data governance.

To support Solvency II regulations you need both risk management and data governance to ensure that the data is timely, accurate and as complete as possible. You also need data governance because you need to be able to prove that you are actually using the relevant models to support your business, so you need some sort of monitoring capability.

The headline SAS product supporting Solvency II is SAS Risk Management for Insurance which includes features to support firm-wide risk (calculation of Pillar I requirements), market risk management, P&C underwriting risk, life underwriting risk, risk data management and risk reporting (Pillar 2 and 3 requirements). Relevant data models are included in the product along with relevant ETL (extract, transform and load) capabilities to support the creation of relevant data marts for analytic purposes.

The data governance aspect of Solvency II compliance is provided by the SAS DataFlux Data Management Platform. This is a an integrated suite of products, built on top of a single infrastructure (so this is truly integrated and not a bunch of acquisitions that have been bolted together) that provides data profiling, data cleansing, data enrichment, ETL and other data integration options, and, for those that require it, master data management. The platform also provides specific facilities to support data stewards and data governance processes.

SAS, as one might expect, provides all the services one could wish for and it also has a number of systems integrators as partners, such as Accenture, Capgemini and Deloitte Consulting, who can also provide relevant services.