5 years of Consortix - interview

Would you tell us about the beginnings and how you got in touch with SAS?

Tamás Ács: We have started our company with a couple of people having experience in the banking and Anti-Money Laundering world. Our journey as a SAS partner started with opportunities to participate in SAS AML implementation projects in the UK and in Australia.

After the first experiences, we started working on a strategic partnership with SAS with the aim to package the SAS AML offerings for the mid-market, around Europe. As a result, we have jointly created the AML Accelerator solution which opened up the mid-market for SAS and our team.

Our first implementation as a prime contractor, using the Accelerator, was Landsbankinn in Iceland, who became one of our closest, long-term partners.

Great to hear such good news, but I assume, Landsbankinn was not the only one representing the success regarding the implementation and satisfaction as well.

Tamás Sváb: Landsbankinn was followed by over 25 AML projects, some of them being own implementations, while some have been delivered jointly with SAS PSD. In the meantime, we established ourselves as SAS AML experts besides the Accelerator as well, and we are working together with SAS and SAS PSD on some of the large accounts, especially in the Nordics.

Tamás Ács: It has been a great journey so far which took us to clients from Iceland to Greece, from Portugal to Finland in Europe and even to Mozambique in Africa. Consortix Canada, which has been established as well to focus on the Canadian market has had its first projects as well.

Consortix is also a SAS MASP partner which means you can provide SAS AML software as a service solution. What does this mean for the company in practice?

Tamás Sváb: Compliance today is not an option, but a must. The AML regulations apply to financial institutions who must maintain an auditable anti-money laundering and customer due diligence regime, which poses a great challenge for these institutions.

A growing number of financial institutions cannot manage with in-house solutions nor are they looking for complex on-premise deliveries. They are looking for effective, powerful, and flexible services available on a subscription basis. That is exactly what we provide with our Accelerator Cloud service, which builds on the power of SAS AML, our Accelerator solution all hosted and available as a cloud service thanks to the MASP model of SAS.

These are remarkable results. As you highlighted, Consortix started with a couple of people. How did this kind of growth materialize at the team level?

Tamás Ács: In the meantime, we are constantly expanding, and grew from 5 to over 30 colleagues while having memorable experiences as a close-knit team.

Our hiring practice is a little bit unusual, as we are not really interested in the background of the candidates, but rather in their personality: if they are motivated, talented fast learner young persons. They, with the help of our senior expert team having decades of experience in the field, can become experts rapidly as well. Consequently, we have people in our staff with background of sociology, psychology, engineering, economy, library sciences, informatics, and even others. This diversity of the different background helped us to build a great team. We try to create an environment, where working in the field of financial crime mitigation is not just challenging and exciting, but fun as well.

Although having been partners for 5 years now, we can truly say, this is just the beginning. What about the future?

Tamás Sváb: We are planning to expand further within the financial crime domain. In the AML field we see an increasing demand for high-value consultancy, software as a service and – I am sure you will not be shocked – AI and machine learning. We are investing greatly in the latter, running pilot projects for utilizing the latest technology in practice for AML optimization.

Besides AML, we are working on expanding to the banking fraud field as well as we see that the AML and fraud areas converging.

Tamás Ács: Our vision is to become the leading financial crime consultancy in Europe, while further expanding our cooperation with SAS.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank the SAS community for this great journey. Besides building up our business, we have got to know great people through this partnership, around Europe, Canada, Africa and the US. Thank you for this great cooperation and looking forward to the road ahead!

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