KUALA LUMPUR: Affin Bank Bhd has teamed up with SAS Malaysia in which the latter will provide comprehensive solutions to facilitate the bank's Basel II framework.

The bank's chief risk officer, Kasinathan Kasipillai, said in compliance with the framework, it had recently implemented the SAS Enterprise Risk Management solution by integrating its risk management procedures which were previously separated from the bank's other business lines.

“We are constantly looking at ways to better service our customers, while maintaining good management of our banking strategy and operations,” he told StarBiz.

Basel II, among other things, places greater emphasis on credit and operational risks and the adoption deadline for banks in Malaysia is either 2008 or 2010.

The first deadline applies if the standardised approach was adopted, while the second is for banks that adopt the internal rating approach, which involves heavy reliance on their internal data and information.

He said Affin Bank, under the framework, was currently at the first stage for both credit (standardised approach) and operational (basic indicator approach) risk management.

For credit risk, he added, there were plans to adopt the second stage (internal rating-based models) over time.

As clean and verifiable data was critical to corroborate the soundness of the predictive qualities of these rating models, the bank had started to work on more stringent date requirements for this progression, he said.

According to Kasinathan, the bank decided to implement the Enterprise Risk Management solution as it was a powerful tool that was able to give a great advantage for being so uniquely flexible.

It allows data integration, metadata management, user authority management and credit/operation risk reporting capabilities to fuse within a single platform, he noted.

“By adopting these solutions, it provides the bank with comprehensive risk-related reporting capabilities to meet both internal management and Basel-related reporting, as well as solid justifications to set the bank’s strategic and operational directions.

“It also allows the bank to gain an enhanced risk management capability that better translates its loan losses records and patterns in order to formulate sound business and credit plans or policies that are no longer subjected to gut feel,” he said.

SAS Malaysia is a subsidiary of US-based business intelligence software company SAS International.

At present, more than 430 banks globally are using SAS solutions. SAS International is one of the market leaders in business intelligence software and services and its solutions are used in more than 43,000 sites globally.