Know the risk
Reduce risk, boost revenue and keep your best customers with FICO scores. Bring the competitive advantages of analytics to your business — precision, consistency and speed.
With FICO scoring products, you reap the benefits of advanced predictive analytics, based on the data of millions of consumers, without shouldering the expense of custom development, testing and maintenance. Scores are available through credit bureaus and through FICO itself.
A score is a number that gives you a clear forecast of future customer behavior. Scorecards analyze historical data — for example, a consumer's credit file — and assign a three-digit number to an individual or customer. With credit risk scores, such as the FICO score, this number indicates the likelihood that the consumer will miss loan payments. FICO also develops scores that predict other consumer behaviors, such as how likely a consumer is to respond to a particular promotional campaign.
How scores work
Scores make it easy to segment customers and target decisions. You can set score "cutoffs" for any decision, and match the decision, the offer, the pricing and other variables to each consumer's score level.
FICO scores are used billions of times a year to help lenders, insurers, rating agencies and other parties:
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Control risk. In marketing, origination / underwriting, customer management, collections and other areas, scores rank-order accounts by risk level, giving you insight into your customers and portfolio, and the ability to target decisions.
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Find new customers. Scores can be used to "prescreen" consumers at a credit bureau, in order to find the ones who match your desired risk level or other criteria.
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Identify the best prospects for new offers. You can use scores to match product offers to customers, based on their needs, risk, likelihood to respond or other measures.
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Assess portfolio quality. Scores provide a clear, objective measure of a set of loans or customer accounts, giving lenders, insurers, rating agencies and prospective portfolio buyers a solid measure of portfolio quality.
Improve Your Decision Yield
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Precision |
Scorecards balance dozens, even hundreds of pieces of data to produce scores that give a very accurate forecast of future customer behavior. |
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Consistency |
By using score cutoffs, you can make decisions on all your customers using a common measure. |
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Agility |
Adjusting score cutoffs is an easy way to raise or lower risk exposure, change your acceptance rate or modify other decision thresholds. |
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Speed |
Scores can be calculated in real-time and delivered instantaneously through links to third parties or FICO, or you can access recent scores to make decisions. |
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Cost |
Scores are inexpensive, require minimal operational work within your systems to access and use, and can be used to automate decisions, freeing your staff to focus on other areas. |
Why Choose FICO?
Credit grantors and other businesses recognize FICO as the leading developer of scores that predict customer behavior. Our scores guide billions of decisions each year, and our FICO® score is the world's most widely used credit bureau risk score.
- Our scores deliver proven predictive performance. First and foremost, our scores are an extremely predictive solution that has helped thousands of lenders and insurers manage risk exposure. Behind our scores' predictive power are 20+ years of experience, multiple-model scoring systems that produce an extremely accurate score for each individual, and regular updates of the models to reflect changes in consumer behavior and to ensure compliance with government regulations.
- Our consistent scaling makes your job easier. We calibrate our scoring models across data sources so that a 680 from one source indicates the same level of risk as a 680 from another source. This makes it easier for you to control your risk exposure, set consistent score cutoffs and analyze results by score range.
- You can rely on an industry standard. More businesses, rating agencies and other parties use our scores than any other. No scores have undergone more rigorous and frequent testing by third parties to make sure they are accurate, consistent and fair. When and if the regulators come to call, you can be confident when using FICO scores.
- We help you get more from your scores. With more than 20 years delivering scores, and 50 years building predictive models for businesses around the world, we have the expertise to help you use scoring better. Our scoring experts can help you use scores in your strategies, monitor results, understand score performance and explain your use of scores to your customers. We also support all our scoring clients through our work with regulators and legislators on the use of scoring and access to data.
- FICO is the scoring innovator. We pioneered the first commercially available scoring systems in the US and Europe. We continue to bring new innovations that make scores more powerful, and introduce new scores that help you automate and improve more customer decisions. Among our scoring milestones are the world's most widely used credit bureau risk score, the FICO® score; the first insurance scores, the first commercial small business scoring systems, and the first multi-country credit bureau score.
Learn More
White Paper: A New Highly Predictive FICO® Score for An Uncertain World (pdf)
Lenders gain a 5%-15% predictive boost to manage business and control losses.
White Paper: Scoring Your Customers: How Often is Often Enough? (pdf)
New FICO research shows how consumers' FICO® scores are changing, and what it means for refreshing scores.
White Paper: Are Today's Market Pressures Reshaping Credit Risk? (pdf)
A new study explores FICO score trends in dynamic times—and how lenders can respond
White Paper: How Much Credit is Too Much? (pdf)
How much credit can a consumer handle? Will your new loan be the one that pushes a "good" borrower over the edge?
Decision Management Community
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