SAS Customer Bankinter Wins Gartner CRM Excellence Award; 'Delivering Measurable Value' Voted Key Winning Criteria

Business Wire, March 18, 2005

CARY, N.C. -- SAS, the leader in business intelligence, today announced that its customer, Bankinter, has won the prestigious Gartner European CRM Excellence Award. Bankinter, a leading Spanish retail bank, is using SAS(R) Customer Intelligence solutions to help drive a successful customer relationship management (CRM) strategy company-wide.

"An effective CRM strategy has helped us increase customer profitability, improve the quality of our customer relationships and support Bankinter's key business and strategic goals," said Fernando Morillo, head of CRM, Bankinter. "SAS solutions have helped us create new intelligence about our customers that has driven successful customer initiatives around insight-driven marketing and improved sales effectiveness."

Bankinter's CRM system reaches across its entire organization, including all its customer segments and bank networks with a multi-channel approach. Bankinter uses SAS to create customer intelligence that is used to identify, segment, and drive a large number of marketing campaigns and offers, while avoiding cross-channel conflicts and optimizing customer contacts.

"Bankinter understands the value of customer intelligence and how it can really drive value out of operational CRM systems. Its modern thinking has allowed it to remain extremely competitive in a rapidly consolidating and challenging banking market. We congratulate Bankinter on winning the 2005 Gartner European CRM Excellence Award," said Phil Winters, vice president of customer intelligence at SAS. "We are proud to be a part of Bankinter's CRM initiatives which have improved its overall customer experience, as well as helped to improve its profitability."

About SAS

SAS is the market leader in providing a new generation of business intelligence software and services that create true enterprise intelligence. SAS solutions are used at more than 40,000 sites -- including 96 of the top 100 companies on the FORTUNE Global 500(R) -- to develop more profitable relationships with customers and suppliers; to enable better, more accurate and informed decisions; and to drive organizations forward. SAS is the only vendor that completely integrates leading data warehousing, analytics and traditional BI applications to create intelligence from massive amounts of data. For nearly three decades, SAS has been giving customers around the world The Power to Know(R). Visit us at www.sas.com.

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