UK bank uses advanced analytics to reduce risk and cloud costs

Vanquis Bank minimises risk and complies with demanding industry regulations using SAS Viya on Microsoft Azure

Credit is important for a robust financial life in the modern world. For many, however, a limited or poor credit history can be a source of stress and an obstacle to financial advancement. With roots dating to 1880, Vanquis Bank was founded in England to help people struggling to build credit to access financial and lending services. By creating pathways to access financial services, Vanquis Bank is helping its customers open the door to improved financial opportunities.

To accomplish its mission, Vanquis Bank must carefully measure and assess risk. With subprime lending presenting higher levels of uncertainty compared to other credit services, Vanquis Bank invests significant resources to manage risk and ensure compliance with robust industry regulations, including the International Financial Reporting Standard 9 (IFRS9).

“Data is at the heart of everything that we do,” explains Sangeet Lee-Sarkar, Lead SAS Administrator at Vanquis Bank. “We process huge volumes of complex data to drive risk reporting, risk management, and product marketing and to gain insight into customer needs and preferences. Without a reliable data platform, it would be difficult to deliver information to regulatory bodies and decision-makers in the business when they need it.”

For many years, Vanquis Bank has supported its data analytics activities with SAS solutions, which have helped maintain an excellent compliance posture. However, the bank was encountering recurring issues with complex and time-consuming custom-built processes. What’s more, Vanquis Bank’s data volumes and supporting infrastructure were rapidly expanding - generating additional costs for the business. To solve these challenges, the bank looked to improve the cost-efficiency of the IT environment and ensure users could access the high-performance resources needed to run demanding analytics jobs.

Achieving next-level efficiency

To optimise its analytics activities and drive even faster performance, Vanquis Bank decided to modernise to SAS Viya hosted in the Microsoft Azure cloud. SAS Viya allowed Vanquis to model faster, scale projects more effectively, and reduce cloud computing costs.

At the same time, the bank implemented SAS Grid Manager to centralise and simplify workload balancing across its grid computing environment. Layering SAS Grid Manager with Viya allowed Vanquis Bank to further reduce cloud and IT infrastructure costs by centralising the management of analytical workflows and optimising resources. Together, these tools create a powerful duo capable of creating a highly available, reliable, and efficient analytical network.

“We have used previous versions of SAS Viya on-premises at Vanquis Bank for many years with great success,” explains Lee-Sarkar. “So, when version four of SAS Viya was released, we decided to set up sandboxed environments to explore how the solution could help to provide greater accuracy and reliability in our core reporting and risk management activities.”

Currently, business users across Vanquis Bank are exploring SAS Viya through two proof-of-concept exercises. One team is considering how to best use the latest features and functionality of SAS Viya in their analytics workflows, while the other is stress-testing the platform to ensure accuracy and resiliency before a full production rollout.

Lee-Sarkar continues, “Our analytics needs are unique and specialised, so establishing the new instance of SAS Viya presented some technical hurdles. However, the SAS team was always on hand to help to make sure that we overcame them quickly and effectively.”

Driving more efficient, cost-effective analytics

Vanquis Bank is now finalising its rollout of SAS Viya on Microsoft Azure and SAS Grid Manager and has already seen a significant boost in efficiency. Furthermore, the bank has achieved greater visibility and control over its Microsoft Azure cloud resources.

“One of the most valuable features of the latest version of SAS Viya is that it allows us to start onboarding users that use Python code and transition some code from SAS to Python,” says Lee-Sarkar. “Another tremendous benefit is the way SAS Viya enables us to automatically scale compute resources according to pre-defined parameters. Ultimately, this helps us to reduce cloud infrastructure costs and also ensures users have the performance and resources they need to drive large-scale analytics initiatives—from risk management to product marketing.”

Using the automation features in SAS Viya has also enabled the Vanquis Bank analytics team to overcome the persistent issues they previously encountered. Lee-Sarkar comments, “By resolving the issues we have freed more time to concentrate on value-added initiatives such as the broader rollout of SAS Viya and discussing how the insights from our analytics activities can help to enhance the business.”

SAS Viya is also helping Vanquis Bank maintain robust risk management and ensure IFRS9 compliance. “Our analytics team now spends more time building stronger relationships with other business units and collaborating more effectively on regulatory compliance, risk management and reporting,” Lee-Sarkar says. “Improving our ability to report to our regulators ultimately helps us to safeguard our reputation as a trustworthy, community-focused bank committed to helping people improve their financial situations.”

Lee-Sarkar concludes, “We’re just at the start of our journey with SAS Viya and we’re excited for what lies ahead. We’ve already improved collaboration and reporting efficiency and reduced IT costs, releasing more time and resources for us to focus on delivering excellent customer service."