Sandy Spring Bank Leverages INEA to Deliver Business Value Creation

TORONTO, March 18, 2003 -- INEA Corporation, the leading provider of corporate performance management software for financial institutions, today announced that Sandy Spring Bank, the third largest commercial banking organization headquartered in Maryland, has implemented the INEA Performance Management Suite.

In recent years, Sandy Spring Bank has grown both in size and complexity. As a result, the Company recognized the need to evolve the finance department into a more proactive forward-looking function able to provide business managers with financial consulting expertise to enable them to improve the profitability of their business units.

According to Dennis Neville, Senior Vice President and Controller of Sandy Spring Bank, Providing the numbers isnt enough. One of the most important things we can bring to management is the ability to gain insight into initiatives that drive value for the Bank." Neville adds, To this end, INEA enabled us to rapidly put in place an integrated planning, forecasting, reporting and analysis system that supports a holistic, proactive approach to managing our business. We are excited about completing our phase one initiative relating to 2003 planning and will be pursuing other defined forecasting, analysis and reporting goals during 2003 and 2004."

When evaluating a range of software solutions, Sandy Spring Bank developed a comprehensive list of system requirements -- referred to as their vision of the perfect system." Among the list of criteria, the Bank identified the need to deliver more consistent and transparent information, and to serve a wide variety of users throughout the Bank and its related companies.

As we evaluated different vendor solutions, the value quickly became clear to us from INEAs unique focus on providing a corporate performance management application for financial institutions. There is a certain comfort level in knowing that we would be working with people who understood our world," says Phil Mantua, Senior Vice President of Management Accounting at Sandy Spring Bank. Plus, we could immediately begin to leverage INEAs rich bank-specific functionality, rather than spend time on building these capabilities in a generic offering."

Adds Neville, INEA is a leading-edge technology that is a key part of our longer-term decision support system requirements, such as evolving our initiatives around customer profitability. We look to INEA as a partner to enable us to leverage better quality information as we continue to grow our business."

Our customers are financial institutions who are proactively creating an environment capable of driving sustainable performance," said Mark Ruddock, president and CEO, INEA. Sandy Spring Bank has embraced the CPM Suite from INEA, fundamentally because it helps them realize that vision more quickly and more cost effectively than any other solution. I am thrilled to welcome Sandy Spring Bank to the INEA client family, a family that now encompasses industry leading financial services enterprises that range in size from $2BB -- $250BB in assets, and look forward to their insight as we continue our practice of client-led product evolution."

In summary, INEA enables Sandy Spring Bank to realize significant benefits:
- A single system that enables integrated planning, forecasting, analysis, and internal and external reporting for its bank-wide operations.

- The movement from a static annual budget process to a dynamic, monthly planning and forecasting process that links manager goal-setting with relevant business drivers.

- Replacement of a manual-intensive data gathering process for target setting and performance measurement with an efficient business process, that also enables the expeditious delivery of actionable information to line managers.

- An infrastructure to support mergers & acquisitions; as well as profitability analysis across the organization, including customer, product and business lines.

About Sandy Spring Bancorp/Sandy Spring Bank
With over $2.3 billion in assets, Sandy Spring Bancorp is the holding company for Sandy Spring Bank and its principal subsidiaries, Sandy Spring Insurance Corporation and The Equipment Leasing Company. Sandy Spring Bancorp is the third largest publicly traded banking company headquartered in Maryland. Sandy Spring is a community banking organization that focuses its lending and other services on businesses and consumers in the local market area. Independent and community-oriented, Sandy Spring Bank traces its origin to 1868 and offers a broad range of commercial banking, retail banking and trust services through 30 community offices and 45 ATMs located in Anne Arundel, Frederick, Howard, Montgomery, and Prince Georges counties in Maryland. Visit www.sandyspringbank.com for more information.
Forward-Looking Statements: This press release may contain forward-looking statements regarding intentions and the ability to achieve financial goals or the future financial performance of Sandy Spring Bancorp. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, including a variety of factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from the anticipated results expressed in these forward-looking statements. In addition Bancorp's past results do not necessarily indicate future results. Sandy Spring Bancorp assumes no duty to update the forward-looking statements made in this presentation.

About INEA Corporation
INEA Corporation is the world's leading vendor of Corporate Performance Management solutions for the financial services industry. INEA's application, which is built specifically for financial institutions, is the first to deliver enterprise planning, forecasting, modeling, profitability analytics, and management and regulatory reporting on a single platform. The INEA CPM application is based on a modern Web-enabled architecture that can be deployed rapidly across the enterprise.

INEAs software is deployed in over 38 countries and is used to enable corporate performance management by the world's leading financial institutions, including the Royal Bank of Canada, Scotiabank, KeyBank, and TD Bank Financial Group. INEA is also employed as the analytics platform to rapidly facilitate mergers and acquisitions in financial organizations, such as JPMorganChase.

INEA employs a team with a rich blend of financial services and technology expertise. The company is based in Toronto, with US headquarters in New York and European headquarters in London. More information on INEA is available at www.ineacorp.com.
INEA, Information Equals Advantage, and e-Analytics for e-Business are trademarks or registered trademarks of INEA Corporation. All other names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

For more information, please contact:

Lucy Fusaro             
Vice President, Marketing       
INEA Corporation         
(416) 860-0887, ext. 286      
lucy.fusaro@ineacorp.com         
Martha DArcy            
Maverick Public Relations Inc.      
(416) 640-5523            
marthad@maverickpr.com      
         
Jim Langmead
Executive Vice President & Chief Financial Officer
Sandy Spring Bank   
(800) 399-5919
jlangmead@sandyspringbank.com

Kulley Bancroft
Assistant Vice President, Marketing
Sandy Spring Bank
(800) 399-5919
kbancroft@sandyspringbank.com