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Accenture and SAS have teamed up in a bid to develop, implement and manage next-generation predictive analytics solutions for the financial services sector.

The Accenture SAS Analytics Group, will combine Accenture's business knowledge with SAS's analytics solutions and capabilities. Accenture and SAS have successfully worked together for more than 10 years on more than 100 global clients and across a variety of industries, including Norway Post, Safeco Insurance in the US, Italy’s Snam Rete Gas, and UBS, the global financial services firm.

"The Group will help companies take their business results to the next level by applying best-of-breed predictive analytics and best practices to complex questions and decisions,” said Jim Goodnight, CEO at SAS. “Together, we will deliver a high performance analytic platform combined with management and industry expertise that is platform-independent, so organizations can leverage their existing IT infrastructure."

The Accenture SAS Analytics Group plans to focus initially on developing a series of predictive solutions for the financial services industry, including banking and insurance; healthcare services, including payer/provider and pharmaceuticals; as well as the public sector, in areas such as federal and human services. In addition, cross-industry functional solutions are expected to start with customer acquisition and retention, as well as enterprise analytics.

William D. Green, Accenture's chairman & CEO, added: "Companies that use predictive analytics to derive actionable insights from data and then use those insights to shape decisions, can improve business outcomes and substantially outperform competitors over the long term."

According to new Accenture research, two-thirds of senior managers in the US and UK say their top long-term objective is to develop the ability to model and predict behaviour, actions and decisions to the point where individual decisions and offers can be made in real time based on the analysis at hand. “This move meets a pressing need in the marketplace. What is in very short supply are experts who are familiar with analytic techniques and know how to apply them to industry-specific decisions,” commented Henry Morris, senior vice president for IDC’s Worldwide Software and Services.

Questions remain

That raises other questions, according to  Madan Sheina of research house Ovum. “The question is whether or not organizations are capable of harnessing the value of predictive analytics,” said Sheina. “Predictive analysis becomes powerful when applied to a business problem,  when it's given a business purpose. The greatest barrier to large-scale deployment is the level of skill and expertise needed to use it effectively. The sticking points are the complexity of building and implementing predictive models, and a lack of understanding and expertise in the organisations seeking to benefit from it. What's in short supply are in-house experts familiar with predictive modeling and analysis techniques and the know-how to apply them to business/industry-specific applications.”

That said, Sheina reckons that the SAS/Accenture coupling is a potentially powerful combo. “SAS is a good fit for Accenture,” said the Ovum analyst. “The company offers a sophisticated yet flexible platform that's well suited to support industry-specific analytic applications, and to which Accenture can add its business and industry know-how. The partnership also plays to another of SAS's strengths: its ability to productise custom-developed analytic solutions and offer them as packaged applications.

“The competitive trends are clear. It isn't enough for vendors to sell sophisticated and advanced analytics; they also need to offer complementary value-added services that bridge the technology-industry expertise gap. Conversely, large consulting firms need to build strong analytics practices to take full advantage of lucrative consulting opportunities arising from heightened interest in predictive analytic solutions.”

Sheina concluded:“However, this alliance is about more than just helping organisations to build and deploy predictive analytics. Over time, smart organisations committed to predictive technologies will look to reduce their reliance on expensive external consultants and will demand skills transfer so they can maintain, update, and even build their own models from scratch.”