BNP Paribas: Exchanging SAS for Scalable Intelligence

BNP Paribas, one of the world’s largest banking groups, is modernizing its data strategy by transitioning from legacy tools to collaborative, future-proof platforms.

Central to this transformation is the adoption of Dataiku, The Universal AI Platform™, which has enabled multiple branches of the group (including BNP Paribas Commercial Banking in France, BGL BNP Paribas in Luxembourg, and BNP Paribas Group’s stress testing teams) to modernize data preparation and analytics initiatives.

The Problem: Inefficiencies From Legacy Systems

For decades, BNP Paribas relied heavily on legacy systems like SAS and Alteryx to manage data preparation and analytics. Over time, this introduced major pain points:

• Operational inefficiency: Analytics projects were slow to operationalize, requiring complex alignment between business, IT, and analytics teams.
  
• Costly, complex infrastructure: Reliance on too many overlapping tools created cost and governance challenges.
  
• Talent bottlenecks: As SAS-trained talent became scarce, the pool of resources shrank and slowed project delivery.
  
• Aging infrastructure: Twenty-five years of accumulated SAS projects and 100 terabytes of data no longer aligned with Group standards.

These challenges converged with external pressures, including the planned end of support and rising costs for SAS, the need for regulatory compliance at scale, and a broader Group IT rationalization program to reduce shadow IT and unify governance. The result was clear: BNP Paribas needed to modernize its data stack to ensure efficiency, scalability, and long-term sustainability.

We needed a tool that young graduates are already trained in. Dataiku emerged as the clear choice. Stéphane Baudoin Data Office Manager, BNP Paribas, BCEF

A Modernization Solution: Why BNP Paribas Chose Dataiku

Dataiku was already familiar to BNP Paribas Retail Banking unit, with 150+ business users active on the platform before the official transition from SAS began. It addressed both the business need for continuity and the IT mandate for modernization:

• Automation at scale: A migration engine (developed with partner Euraxiel) automated the transformation of 75%+ of SAS code, minimizing disruption.
• Change management: Certification programs retrained SAS users, requiring two certificates before license access.
• Governance with agility: A centrally managed, Group-approved offering ensured compliance while empowering self-service.
• Cross-team collaboration: Connecting risk, compliance, retail, and stress-testing teams on a single platform.

Dataiku has been a wonderful platform to process work efficiently and manage a direct collaboration between these various teams. Marc Irubetagoyena Head of Group Stress Testing and Financial Simulations at BNP

Deployment and Adoption at Scale

BNP Paribas began its Dataiku journey in 2016 with 11 users in Luxembourg. Since then, adoption has scaled dramatically:

• 1,000+ users across 35+ business units, spanning retail banking, personal finance, stress testing, risk, compliance, corporate, and HR.
• 177 live projects from the Monitoring and Reporting team, with 40% running weekly and average gains of 30 minutes per project per run, and up to three days saved per run.
• 1,000+ projects in retail banking alone, supporting financial/regulatory reporting, HR analytics, ESG analytics, and customer journey monitoring.
• 30,000 stress-testing scenarios automated daily, fully auditable for European Central Bank requirements.
• A fraud detection prototype was built in just eight weeks, supported by enterprise-grade security.

Now, every morning, people are using Dataiku and they’re the ones talking about it, not me. Stéphane Baudoin Data Office Manager, BNP Paribas, BCEF

Results: Efficiency, ROI, and Business Value

The modernization program with Dataiku has already delivered measurable impact:

• 75%+ of SAS projects converted automatically, up from 25% at program start.
• 2x acceleration in SAS project migration, with more SAS projects migrated in four months than in the first eight months of pilot. 
• Hours saved per day for data risk analysts on daily approval checks.
• Standardized flows across projects, simplifying handovers and boosting adoption.
• Flexibility to output projects in visual Dataiku, SQL, or Python, depending on team needs.
• Improved recruitment and retention, aligning to modern data skills and easing onboarding for new graduates.

When we started to use Dataiku, the first benefit was the speed: the speed of delivery and the speed to convince people. I was quite amazed by that. My teams were mostly SAS users and the timing to be up and running in the solution was incredibly fast. Marc Irubetagoyena Head of Group Stress Testing and Financial Simulations at BNP

Vision for the Future

The bank’s next steps are ambitious: to fully retire SAS and other fragmented tools, cutting costs and eliminating shadow IT; to run parallel design and production environments that accelerate deployment cycles; and to expand beyond data preparation into citizen data science and AI modeling. 

At the same time, BNP Paribas plans to deepen cross-team collaboration, ensuring that business, IT, and analytics teams co-develop solutions together. Extending this virtuous circle, everything new (from replacing SAS to automating Excel and Knime projects) now begins in Dataiku. By unifying people, tools, and governance on a single platform, BNP Paribas is embedding scalable intelligence into daily operations.

The Group shared self-service Dataiku offering allows our users to develop data preparation flows completely autonomously. Philippe A. BNP Paribas