Global data and AI innovator SAS is named a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Financial Crime Management Solutions, Q3 2026, Forrester Research's latest evaluation of market's most significant solution providers. Among 15 firms evaluated, SAS earned highest overall score in current offering category, 4.70 out of 5. Highest current offering score and top possible marks in nine of 11 criteria distinguish SAS in recent analyst evaluation.
Forrester: "SAS' vision shines with its converged support for AML and fraud management plus agentic AI capabilities for investigations and decisioning," notes Wave report, one of industry's most established and closely followed vendor evaluations benchmarking fraud and financial crime technology.
In Forrester current offering analysis, SAS financial crime management solutions suite run on AI-powered, cloud-native SAS Viya also earned highest possible score in nine of 11 criteria more than any other vendor evaluated. SAS top scores span full financial crime management life cycle: Data integration, Administrator management, Watchlist management and screening, AI/ML-based risk scoring, Transaction type support, Queue definitions and alert routing, Case management, Third-party integrations, Regulatory and operational reporting.
SAS which marked 50th anniversary this year received above-average customer feedback relative to other evaluated vendors in Wave evaluation. In particular, customers like SAS ML model building and model testing capabilities. Further, SAS received no below-par scores across current offering criteria, only solution provider to achieve that distinction.
Fraud and AML converge around AI and data intelligence. That breadth and depth are critical for financial institutions as fraud and money laundering increasingly reveal themselves as two sides of same coin.
"Financial institutions cannot converge fraud and AML detection on fragmented data, and they cannot safely scale agentic AI without trusted data and governance," said Stu Bradley, Senior Vice President of Risk, Fraud and Compliance Solutions at SAS.
In report, Forrester defines financial crime management solutions as integrated platforms that bring together enterprise fraud management with know-your-customer and anti-money laundering capabilities. That convergence, commonly called FRAML, reflects practical reality: To detect and investigate modern-day financial crime effectively, institutions must connect dots across fragmented data linking overlapping identities both real and synthetic with accounts, transactions, behaviors and signals often sitting in separate systems.
According to Forrester, "Overall, SAS offers one of the strongest solutions in terms of technical capabilities." Its Wave report notes SAS powerful AI agent for extracting schemas from data sources, broad productized data source integrations and wide range of customizable SAS IP algorithms for ML-based risk scoring. With AI agents taking on more investigative and decisioning work with less human intervention, governance encompassing trust, transparency, oversight and control becomes even more consequential. Forrester notes "AI governance is also integral" to SAS vision and approach.
"As AI agents play a greater role in investigations and decisioning, strong governance and human oversight are paramount," added Bradley. "Not to automate for automation's sake, but to give investigators better context, more intelligent prioritization and trusted decision support so they can confidently tackle evolving threats."
About SAS
SAS is a global leader in data and AI, helping organizations make confident decisions with AI they can trust. For decades, SAS has set standard for delivering software that drives meaningful impact, incorporating deep industry expertise, transparency and governance. SAS gives you THE POWER TO KNOW.
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