Shawbrook Bank, expert providers of personal loans, residential and commercial mortgages, SME finance, and savings products, has implemented SAS® Viya® on Microsoft Azure to enhance its application of analytics, mitigate risk and better meet customers’ evolving needs.

Headquartered in the United Kingdom, Shawbrook serves individuals, small and midsize businesses, and real estate investors, offering a broad range of lending products and savings accounts. 

With more than 425,000 customers, a £10.5 billion loan book and £10.9 billion in customer savings, Shawbrook knew that it needed to modernise its operations to better meet the needs of not only the company, but also its customers.

Leaders in AI and analytics and with extensive experience across the banking sector, SAS is supporting Shawbrook through this journey, with the bank currently transitioning from an on-premise data centre to the cloud.

Commenting on the implementation, Paul Allton, Chief Prudential Risk Officer Shawbrook Bank, said: 

“There are multiple benefits to using SAS Viya on Microsoft Azure. First and foremost, being able to tackle our data wherever and however it’s delivered to us – whether that’s on-premise or the cloud. 

“New modelling techniques will also give us an edge in terms of understanding the performance of customers far better than we did before. With the SAS technology in place, we can choose to support more customers with their borrowing needs for the same risk, or we can actually choose to have less risk with what we do today - something that is becoming increasingly important.”

The implementation of SAS Viya will enable Shawbrook to test and validate models before they are put into production, then deploy models into business processes in just a few clicks, as well as easily monitor the performance of models regardless of the language used to create them.

Allton continued: 

“I don’t want to wait for a performance report to tell me a model is not working; I want to have the insights at my fingertips to make a change in real time. Having that option and improving that resilience in the business is crucial. 

“Longer term, I’m really excited about taking Shawbrook to a place where we are leveraging machine learning and AI to essentially say ‘yes’ to more customers and address new markets, which is going to be a really important, powerful proposition.”

Roderick Crawford, Senior Vice President, SAS Northern Europe said: 

“The banking industry has dramatically transformed over the last decade as financial institutions and consumers continue to adapt to an increasingly digital world. With SAS Viya in place, Shawbrook can now maximise productivity, spending less time waiting for insights and more time acting on them and we are very much looking forward to supporting the bank as it continues to modernise.”