AXA Financial Selects SAS Enterprise Miner

SAS Institute, a market leader in data warehousing and decision support, announced that AXA Financial Inc, a leading diversified financial services organization and member of the global AXA Group, has selected Enterprise Miner as the key analytical component of its customer relationship management (CRM) strategy. As the newest building block of its Enterprise Data Warehouse Architecture (EDWA), Enterprise Miner will help AXA Financial understand the total value of its customers to sustain profitable growth and ensure that future actions are based on customer-centric decisions.

Using a "think global, act local" approach, AXA Financial evaluated data mining analytical engines in the marketplace and shared the results with AXA's global CRM IT group. The analysis concluded that Enterprise Miner is the most comprehensive and powerful data mining software suite, and a worldwide contract with SAS was negotiated. In addition to AXA Financial, two other major AXA companies - AXA France and AXA Colonia of Germany - have purchased this software.

"We believe data mining is an essential ingredient in the delivery of world-class service and support to our customers," said Kent Bauer, IT director for data mining at AXA Financial. "There now exists the possibility to not only develop and share models across business functions within AXA Financial, but to also reuse some of the models across the AXA Group."

At AXA Financial, data mining will be used to better understand and predict customer behavior in support of CRM activities. AXA Financial is in a unique position to take advantage of data mining. It already can calculate earnings, using generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), and can measure customer profitability drivers by agency or associate and through net present value analysis. Data mining will enable the segmentation of customers into profitability clusters to develop cost-effective service levels and target marketing campaigns. Data mining will also be leveraged in the development of customer scoring and retention models and in "cross- and up-selling" strategies.

AXA Financial executives believe that using Enterprise Miner will have a tremendous bottom-line "up-side," as it will turn data into information, information into action, and action into business value. By better understanding customers, AXA Financial can maximize revenue opportunities and optimize the use of resources throughout the company by focusing on the actions and customers that are likely to generate value for both sides of the relationship.

"Although many other data mining software suites are available in the marketplace," said Bauer, "none offer Enterprise Miner's full spectrum of data mining techniques or the kind of integrated data management environment necessary for reducing the time and cost of discovering essential information."

About AXA Financial

AXA Financial Inc is one of the world's premier financial services organizations through its family of strong, well-recognized brands: AXA Advisors LLC; The Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States; Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette Inc and DLJdirect; and Alliance Capital Management L.P. AXA Financial is a member of the global AXA Group, which had $788 billion in assets under management as of December 31, 1999, and operations in approximately than 60 countries.

About SAS

SAS, one of the world's largest privately held software companies, is a leader in decision support and data warehousing, providing integrated enterprise information-delivery and e-business solutions. Founded in 1976, the company markets packaged business solutions for vertical industry and departmental applications, as well as an integrated suite of software tools and consulting services. These allow departments and agencies to transform the wide variety of data within their organizations into information that business users and researchers need to make better decisions. SAS software and services are used at more than 33,000 business, government and university sites in 110 countries. SAS' 1999 revenues totaled $1.02 billion. Please visit SAS Institute's Web site: www.sas.com.

Contact SAS Institute, Beverly Brown, 919-677-8000 x7026, Beverly.Brown@sas.com or AXA Financial, Jeff Tolvin, 212-314-2811, Jeffrey.Tolvin@axacs.com , www.axa-financial.com.