SAS® Visual Investigator helps detect disease and fraud, manage credit collection and risk

Intelligence analysts and investigators have a primary mission: Stay one step ahead. Whether looking for insider threats, disease outbreaks, loan risks, drug trafficking, fraud or other emerging issues, SAS^® Visual Investigator can address them early and head-on. SAS’ new, cloud-ready investigation and alert management product allows analysts to quickly gain a complete view of people, relationships, networks, patterns, events, trends and anomalies across all available data.

Part of the SAS Viya™ family of products, SAS Visual Investigator marries advanced analytics with dynamic and interactive visual workspaces. Analysts can easily grasp reasons for events or alerts and act on deep analytical insights thanks to intuitive visuals and search.

DirectPay is using SAS Visual Investigator to make its investigators more efficient and enable collaboration across the investigative team. The Netherlands-based credit management company buys portfolios of delinquent invoices or loans from companies such as telcos, utilities and online stores. One portfolio could include millions of delinquent invoices or loans. Investigators need a comprehensive view of all information about a case or debtor to unearth relationships, examine anomalies and make decisions.

“The ability to visualize and explore a variety of data sets in different ways, from grids and lists to maps, networks and timelines, will make it easier for us to manage complex investigations,” said Colin Nugteren, Chief Analytics Officer at DirectPay. “Adding a visual interface to a high-performance analytical model helps improve and optimize our quality of service and our collection performance. Investigators can find evidence to relate debt to a person, identify the debtor’s other assets, and when necessary, prove instances of fraud.”

The R&D department at DirectPay has been the primary team to gain direct experience with SAS Visual Investigator.

“The main benefit we see is how easy it is to tailor SAS Visual Investigator to our specific and changing business needs,” said Tom Dogger, Head of R&D at DirectPay. “We have the control in our own hands to create personalized views and bring in new data sources. We don’t need custom coding or more professional services, which empowers investigators. The adaptability of the product makes it valuable not just to fraud and investigation but to other areas of our business like debt reduction and long-term repayment.”

SAS Visual Investigator enables organizations to identify, investigate and govern the entire life cycle of an investigation, search or inquiry. The product allows users to:

• Rapidly turn insight into action. A single application incorporates alert triage, search and discovery, network analysis and exploration, and the ability to document findings. This streamlines operations and enables analysts to make decisions quickly.
• Expose hidden networks faster. SAS automatically builds networks, resolves entities and identifies communities based on the latest documents and data.
• Adapt quickly. SAS Visual Investigator is designed to address varying requirements and changing problems without needing customization by developers. By minimizing the total cost of ownership, SAS Visual Investigator makes cross-department usage viable, while assuring a consistent user interface.
• Harness data in place. Because SAS Visual Investigator is based on SAS Viya – SAS’ open and cloud-ready platform – it can scale to accommodate data of any size, speed and complexity.

“Complex and disparate data can really slow down investigators,” said Brooke Fortson, Product Marketing Manager for Data Science and Emerging Technologies at SAS. “SAS Visual Investigator alleviates these challenges by bringing together data and exposing patterns of interest. The visual and interactive interface lets users import data, perform point-and-click exploratory analysis, and access third-party systems. When all data is easily accessible, well governed and up-to-date, intelligence analysts can stay ahead of issues.”

To learn more, visit sas.com/vi and download the white paper Keeping Fraud Detection Software Aligned with the Latest Threats.

Today's announcement was made at the Analytics Experience conference in Las Vegas, a business
technology conference presented by SAS that brings together more than 10,000 attendees on-site and online to share ideas on critical business issues.

Visualizations broaden understanding of an alert’s context and immediacy

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View entire social networks to explore relationships

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