FICO World Panel: The Long and the Short of It

“Success comes from a thoughtful combination of long term strategy and short term delivery,” said Ivan Cavinato, head of credit risk management at Unicredit.

This summarized a key approach from the panel of customers invited to discuss advances in decision management technology in the closing session at FICO® World 2016, the Decisions Conference, in Washington, DC.

The discussion, chaired by Wayne Huyard, FICO executive vice president for Sales, Marketing and Services, included representatives from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, payments processor Vantiv, Australia’s Yarra Valley Water and Italy’s Unicredit.

Operationalizing analytics brings many different challenges but there was a lot of common ground between panelists who all work at wildly different types of businesses.

Tim Nargassans, Core Boarding Lead at Vantiv, discussed the importance of creating decision management solutions that embrace agile concepts. “It’s critical to not only live agile from start to finish, but also to design scalability in order for the business to control its own destiny,” Nargassans said. “With today’s ever-changing regulatory landscape, the importance of elevating business rules back to the stakeholders without coding cannot be underestimated.”

Stuart Squires from Yarra Valley Water emphasized that when you change the organization by moving to self-service and improving decision management you also need to look at the way you work.

“At Yarra Valley we needed to look at our organizational structure again because the skill-set had changed. Much of the low value work processing application forms that we called ‘tick and flick’ had gone and our staff was enthusiastic about spending more time with customers completing more challenging and satisfying functions.”

For Italy’s Unicredit, building a customer origination system on state-of-the-art FICO technology was just the beginning. “Our business case was based on increasing revenue, reducing operating cost and improving risk cost,” said Ivan Cavinato, head of credit risk management at Unicredit. “But before we could do this we needed to set out the vision and take management along with us, as we got rid of almost all of our legacy systems and started afresh. FICO’s Decision Management Suite helped us to demonstrate that the strategy and vision for Unicredit was a long-term investment for our company.”

“Analytics provides little value without action,” said Ken Elliott, global director of analytics at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, a FICO Platform Partner. “In fact, we see many companies with great analytic capabilities report that they are not realizing the benefits they expected from their big data and analytics investments. At HPE, we help our clients overcome common barriers and operationalize analytics. This means putting analytics to work by integrating insights into every business decision – whether these are long-term strategic decisions, or front-office decisions made thousands of times a day.”

To see the keynote session in full, check the blog for the video in the coming weeks.