DENVER — SAS has introduced its newest business unit, formally rolling up its fraud-fighting offerings and services into a new Fraud and Security Intelligence Division.

The move, announced at the company’s Global Forum event here this week, will help the company take a broader look at the topic, and bring together the various functions across the business to align on fraud. The company has several existing focused divisions, including Internet of Things, and risk.

“It lets us have a much more cohesive approach to the overall marketplace,” said Stu Bradley, vice president of fraud and security intelligence at SAS. “This is a build upon something that’s already been very successful for us. It’s turning an already very good story into an even better story.”

Fraud and related solutions are already one of the company’s fastest-growing areas over the last ten years, Bradley said. “But just because we’re growing quickly doesn’t mean we don’t want to over-invest to capture a greater percentage of the market.”

For the company, creating the division gives it the opportunity to both integrate like functions across the company devoted to the topic — creating on-topic development, deployment, support, and marketing teams, for example. And it allows the company to think more globally about fraud, whereas in the past, it’s been done mostly at a national or regional level.

“We’re going to have better enablement, greater consistency, and centralized resources to deliver to customers, and to enable SAS, partners, and customers,” Bradley said.

The company will also develop a formal customers engagement program on a global level, creating processes and systems from pre-sales through delivery and post-sales, to after-delivery engagement to make sure customers are “optimizing usage” of their offerings.

The company has a number of existing anti-fraud and anti-money laundering products, and Bradley suggested it will likely grow the portfolio as a result of launching the new division. In fact, he said he expects the division to be able to “innovate faster, and at the pace the market is demanding from us.”

David Septoff, president of Cary, NC-based Zencos, an SAS partner, said that the primary perception of fraud as an issue is in financial services, but SAS creating a broader division to tackle the problem helps illustrate that “it cuts across” many industries and businesses. Zencos, he said, has its own focus on fraud, and said SAS’ buildout of the space shows that “the kind of investments we’re making in this area are the right investments.”

“It creates not only focus in terms of who we need to go to SAS, but it validates how we’re going through our business,” Septoff said.