SAS Institute: Intelligent Decisioning Solution in Action

The company drives real-time interactions that can easily create, manage, and govern robust analytically driven business rules to power decisions at scale.

The rapid improvement of AI-powered technologies spurs competition in speed, cost, experience, and intelligent propositions. Day-to-day operations for most companies can range from simple repeatable decisions that can affect single business units to complex cross-functional, high-impact decisions that involve multiple participants.

To remain competitive, banks must engage customers with highly personalised and timely content to build loyalty. To achieve these benefits, banks must build AI-powered decisioning capabilities fuelled by a rich mixture of internal and external data and augmented by edge technologies.

With a vision to deliver next-generation digital banking and lending products and services in Thailand, Krungthai Card (KTC) Public Company Limited operates a credit card-related business, merchant-acquiring business, payment service, as well as a personal loan business.

The company wanted to transform KTC Cards’ customer decisioning systems from covering data uploads, credit checks, and approvals to modernising, simplifying, scaling, and speed-up processes.

However, the previous rules-based credit decisioning system for KTC’s credit card and personal loan approvals was labour and paper-intensive. The task of managing the lifecycle of models used for credit applications—how models used in credit approvals are developed, tested, deployed, and finetuned—was quite tedious.

It was clear that KTC needed a solution that could deliver real-time decisions based on business rules and sophisticated analytics for credit decisioning. To rebuild its credit models to reflect current and potential realities in less than three months, KTC used SAS Intelligent Decisioning to redefine scorecards and significant increases in credit risk (SICR) triggers and to adjust model parameters to incorporate short-to medium-term economic conditions.

Integrated with machine learning and model management capabilities, SAS Intelligent Decisioning is designed for business analysts and IT personnel who put analytical decision models into production, as well as business executives who are responsible for enterprise decisions.

It includes business rules management, decision processing, real-time event detection based on business needs and regulations, as well as decision governance. The new system is a consolidated, automated, real-time decisioning engine that can be scaled up to support new products, services, and projects and connect diverse teams in the future.

As a result, the credit strategy deployment of KTC across departments is smoother with a single consolidated decisioning platform. Project timelines are shorter, often to less than three months now, SAS Institute: Intelligent Decisioning Solution in Action the average used to be eight or nine months.

KTC was also able to reduce the processing time of analytical models by more than 50% in less than a year, and the model development, testing, and deployment were reduced to under 3 months from more than six months.

In addition to that, online shopping via KTC’s credit cards has grown by around 40% compared to pre-pandemic. Spending on marketplace platforms has grown by 15%, and currently, KTC lending growth remains above the market average.

With the advanced analytics capability of SAS Intelligent Decisioning, the SAS Institute won the Analytics Initiative of the Year - Singapore in the Asian Banking and Finance Awards 2022.

The awards honour outstanding banks and financial companies with innovative retail products, services, and strategies that have had a positive impact on their clients and the industry. 

“Winning the award together with KTC is a testament to the strength and capabilities of the SAS Intelligent Decisioning solution. We hope to continue helping our customers to leverage intelligent decisioning within different areas across the bank, from marketing to reach the customer at the right time, to managing risk and optimising the risk-reward decisioning for best outcomes, to preventing fraud in customer transactions and more,” said Nutapone Apiluktoyanunt, Managing Director (Thailand), SAS.

With the Bank of Thailand granting KTC a license for digital lending, KTC vowed to bring and market even newer lending products. Buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) products, lending based on the saving behaviour of customers, hiring purchases, and micro-lending could be part of KTC’s expansion into lending.

Another area of interest that they plan to expand is digital loan origination, which integrates the capability of customers to key in their personal details and capabilities in online identity collection and verification (through NDID, Thailand’s newly launched digital ID system). This enables the aggregation of alternative sources of customer data and the capability for KTC to make credit decisions in the session itself.

This digital loan origination opportunity is a prime example of the cutting edge that SAS Intelligent Decisioning can bring to KTC, as it can now conduct real-time customer interactions and automate operational business decisions at scale.

SAS Institute’s solution can be used in the future in various other scenarios, such as marketing to specific customer segments, collections, e-commerce fraud prevention, payments fraud prevention, and cybersecurity, especially in the post- pandemic future.