Cloud analytics key to digital transformation at National Bank of Greece

Leading Greek financial institution turns to SAS Viya on Azure for modernization efforts 

The National Bank of Greece (NBG) has added SAS and Microsoft to its business transformation plan to improve efficiency and ensure future success. NBG chose the robust capabilities of the SAS^® platform, combined with the cloud elasticity of Microsoft Azure, to address its complex business challenges quickly and efficiently.

To achieve its digital transformation objectives, the bank has established an enterprise analytics and decisioning engine, managed by the Business Analytics Center of Excellence (CoE). The CoE is a hub that acts as a catalyst in the bank’s effort to integrate new analytics technologies into specific daily operations. SAS^® Viya^® is helping NBG achieve CoE goals including operationalizing analytics and capitalizing on their power for achieving strategic goals.

“With the SAS Viya implementation in the cloud, we have significantly improved the CoE’s development of new analytics infrastructure by notably decreasing the costs and the complexity of processes, and by acquiring agility, speed and efficiency,” said Pantelis Maraveas, Assistant General Manager of Retail Segments, Bank Analytics and Liability Products at NBG.

The self-service data mining, artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities of SAS Viya, as well as the flexibility of Azure, also help the bank innovate faster by moving from design phases to rollout phases with increased efficiency. And because the platform is open to all technology, developers use code from several different programming tools, such as Python, R, Java and Lua, helping the bank best maximize existing talent.

“SAS Viya is cloud-ready, and the transfer of operations to the cloud is intertwined with our strategy,” Maraveas said. “Additionally, it is an integrated platform; namely, it has everything we need to have our data both analyzed and visualized. Therefore, each time a new application is needed, we know it is available on the platform.”

Learn more about how SAS Viya on Microsoft Azure is helping the National Bank of Greece transform its operations at sas.com/en_us/customers/national-bank-of-greece.html.