Case Study: Icelandic bank Landsbankinn reduces false positives and streamlines anti-money-laundering investigations with SAS

SAS® helps Landsbankinn reduce false positives and streamline investigation

Landsbankinn, Iceland’s largest bank with 120,000 customers and a 39% market share (and listed as a G-SIB), faced growing regulatory pressure to detect money laundering while maintaining efficient customer service. Their legacy screening system produced roughly 1,000 false positives a day, overwhelming a limited compliance team, and reporting was manual and reactive, reliant on Excel extracts.

By implementing SAS Anti‑Money Laundering and SAS Visual Analytics — and tuning models against an enterprise data warehouse — Landsbankinn cut false positives to about 100–150 per day, allowing investigators to focus on true suspicious cases. Visual Analytics also replaced manual reporting with self‑service, visually rich dashboards for nontechnical users, speeding insights and improving bankwide data-driven decision-making.

Landsbankinn

Thordur Orlygsson

Chief Compliance Officer