SAS named a Leader in financial crime management solutions, setting the bar

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 the market's most significant solution providers. Among the 15 firms evaluated, SAS earned the highest overall score in the current offering category - 4.70 out of 5.

"SAS' vision shines with its converged support for AML and fraud management plus agentic AI capabilities for investigations and decisioning," notes the Wave report, one of the industry's most established and closely followed vendor evaluations benchmarking fraud and financial crime technology.

In Forrester's current offering analysis, SAS' financial crime management solutionssuite - run on AI-powered, cloud-native SAS^® Viya^® - also earned the highest possible score in nine of 11 criteria - more than any other vendor evaluated. SAS' top scores span the full financial crime management life cycle:

1. Data integration.
2. Administrator management.
3. Watchlist management and screening.
4. AI/machine learning (ML)-based risk scoring.
5. Transaction type support.
6. Queue definitions and alert routing.
7. Case management.
8. Third-party integrations.
9. Regulatory and operational reporting.
   

SAS - which marked its 50^th anniversary this year - received above-average customer feedback relative to other evaluated vendors in the Wave evaluation. In particular, customers like SAS' ML model building and model testing capabilities.

Further, SAS received no below-par scores across the current offering criteria - the only solution provider to achieve that distinction. Collectively, these results underscore for SAS the breadth and depth of its platform and capabilities across fraud and financial crime management.

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 the 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 the report, Forrester defines financial crime management solutions as integrated platforms that bring together enterprise fraud management with know-your-customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) capabilities.

That convergence, commonly called FRAML, reflects a practical reality: To detect and investigate modern-day financial crime effectively, institutions must connect the dots across fragmented data. That means linking overlapping identities (both real and synthetic) with accounts, transactions, behaviors and signals that often sit in separate systems.

"Forrester's evaluation reflects firms' urgency - and SAS' ability - to connect disparate data sources, work across technologies and programming languages, and apply advanced analytics responsibly and consistently across fraud and financial crime detection," added Bradley.

Notably, Chartis Research emphasized the same point in its recent Enterprise and Payment Fraud Solutions, 2026: Quadrant Update. Chartis' SAS Vendor Spotlight called SAS' support for FRAML convergence "a key differentiator."

Agentic AI raises the governance stakes for financial crime management

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 a 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 that "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. That's the kind of responsible, data-driven AI SAS delivers."

The AI advantage: moving from more alerts to better decisions

As criminals adopt more sophisticated tactics and exploit growing volumes of digital data and transactions, financial institutions need AI that helps them see more of the picture, not merely process more alerts.

Get practical advice for using predictive modeling, anomaly detection, customer segmentation, network analytics, and threshold setting and tuning to fight financial crime in the SAS white paper, How AI and Machine Learning Are Redefining Anti-Money Laundering.

Forrester does not endorse any company, product, brand, or service included in its research publications and does not advise any person to select the products or services of any company or brand based on the ratings included in such publications. Information is based on the best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. This report is part of a broader collection of Forrester resources, including interactive models, frameworks, tools, data, and access to analyst guidance. For more information, read about Forrester's objectivity here .