Global AI and analytics leader SAS has acquired Honolulu-based Kamakura Corporation.
Kamakura provides specialized software, data and consulting that helps financial organizations across the spectrum – banks, insurance companies, asset managers, pension funds and more – manage a variety of financial risks, a statement said.
“This acquisition is an extension of tremendous investments already made in SAS’ cloud-ready risk management platform and integrated solutions,” said SAS co-founder and CEO Jim Goodnight. “It signals our intent to advance market-changing risk solutions to solve the most pressing challenges our financial services customers face. We foresee that the resulting strength of SAS technology, paired with Kamakura’s risk analytics and credit models, will prove far greater than the sum of its parts.”
In acquiring Kamakura, SAS aims to deliver an unparalleled suite of integrated risk solutions, particularly around asset liability management (ALM), and serve additional facets of the financial services industry, a statement said.
“The synergistic value in the melding of two highly complementary risk technology portfolios is undeniable to anyone familiar with SAS and Kamakura; it’s like joining matching puzzle pieces,” said Sidhartha Dash, Research Director at Chartis. “Merging Kamakura’s strengths – robust ALM and interest rate risk capabilities, proprietary and sophisticated credit models, and risk data – with SAS’ award-winning capabilities in credit risk management and risk and finance integration on SAS® Viya® is a powerful combination for solutions across the entire balance sheet.”
The acquisition will bring these solutions’ capabilities into the SAS fold, along with Kamakura’s executives, leadership team, employees and contractors – a noteworthy accumulation of specialized quantitative risk expertise that would take years to assemble in today’s market, the statement said.
“Joining the SAS family represents an exciting new chapter in Kamakura’s 32-year history,” said van Deventer. “In combination, our like cultures will produce synergies that fuel customer and marketplace innovation. More concretely, adding SAS’ cloud-native Viya technology, risk domain capabilities and intuitive, user-friendly interfaces to Kamakura’s IP will spawn a top-tier, market-changing ALM offering.”
Alongside van Deventer, an acclaimed author of four risk books, Kamakura’s executive leadership team includes Research Director Robert Jarrow, renowned in the quantitative risk field for co-creating two prominent risk modeling frameworks: the Heath-Jarrow-Morton interest rate model and the Jarrow-Turnbull reduced-form credit risk model. Both van Deventer and Jarrow, along with Kamakura COO Martin Zorn, will join SAS to help facilitate the transition and lead the development of future-forward ALM and integrated balance sheet offerings and other risk solution advances, the statement said.
“The fragmented and siloed ways financial organizations have traditionally done asset liability and balance sheet management are becoming cost-prohibitive and unsustainable,” said Troy Haines, Senior Vice President and Head of Risk Research and Quantitative Solutions at SAS. “Augmenting and combining SAS’ decades-long expertise in risk management and finance solutions with Kamakura’s advanced capabilities in ALM will better support the industry’s computationally heavy regulatory risk burdens and promote data-driven decisioning.”
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