EY has this week announced a strategic alliance with SAS to develop and deliver innovative high-performance services across a number of key industry sectors, using SAS’ market-leading advanced analytics platform. The long-term strategic relationship will include market collaboration, co-innovation, and implementation support and enablement activities. Combining EY’s cross-sector experience and the power of the SAS® platform, the alliance will accelerate the delivery of disruptive analytics services that can help organisations achieve greater return on their data.

Mark Weinberger, EY Global Chairman and CEO, says:

“Analytics is transforming how businesses operate, and EY is investing to embed analytics capabilities across our services. The skills, brand, relationships, and subject matter expertise of EY, paired with the robust platform and market penetration of SAS, offer a very compelling value proposition for our clients. Looking ahead, we see an opportunity to further innovate and create new services with SAS.”

The alliance, which reinforces EY’s commitment to analytics and technology-enabled services, focuses on combining the data, software and processing capabilities of the SAS platform with EY’s consulting and market experience, giving clients a single access point for advanced analytics service offerings, including areas such as:

• Stress testing and capital management
• Financial crime and fraud prevention
• Forensic investigation, fraud detection, surveillance, and litigation/regulatory response
• Tax reporting and information management
• Improvements in core operations, such as insurance claims fraud management

EY will continue to work closely with SAS’ research and development organisation to collaborate on the development of new analytics offerings and expand our solution portfolio to address industry-led and globally-relevant client challenges.

Michael Versace, IDC Research Director says:

“Co-innovation as a cultural imperative in and of itself is a tremendous asset to have in the market for both EY and SAS. And as the digital enterprise strategies of their clients begin to take hold, the ecosystem of consulting services and technologies that co-innovation generates will create a differentiated value proposition for both organisations.”

Jim Goodnight, CEO of SAS, says:

“This agreement will allow us to combine our powerful analytics platform with EY’s deep industry and functional experience to help clients more effectively make key strategic business decisions based on their data investments. The expanded relationship also can include new product development initiatives that will help us bring new offerings to the market and further refine our existing analytics solutions.”

For more information about EY’s strategic alliance with SAS, visit www.ey.com/ey-sas.