This is a guest post from Nikola Marcich with the Policy team at the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), the principal trade association for the software and digital content industry. Walking into Bernie Madoff’s home in 2005, you would not have found piles of money under a mattress, behind a sofa or in his garage. At the time, Madoff had been running an elaborate Ponzi scheme through the wealth management arm of his business that reached $65 million by the time of his arrest in 2008, deliberately hiding the money intricately within the financial system. Serving as Madoff’s primary bank for over two decades, JP Morgan was one of the culprits of Madoff’s fraudulent actions and money-laundering tactics. In their innocent incompetence to identify clear red flags about Madoff’s returns and file a Suspicious Activity Report (SAR), JP Morgan’s was fined $1.7 billion in 2014. JP Morgan’s fine highlights the... [Read More]
FICO has been named a Category Leader in IFRS 9 solutions by Chartis Research in its report IFRS 9 Technology Solutions: Market Update 2017. “Like other regulatory mandates of the past decade, IFRS 9 is another transformational event for all financial institutions (FIs),” the report states. “In all likelihood, it will reduce FIs’ profits and retained earnings, increase their loan loss provisions, and have a negative impact on their regulatory and economic capital. To mitigate these impacts, FIs will have to rely heavily on the rigor of their data management and the quality of their data, and on the application of Expected Credit Loss (ECL) modeling and overall governance.” The FICO® IFRS 9 Impairment Management Solution includes industry-leading predictive modeling for loss forecasting; software for high-speed model execution, loss reporting, process governance and “what-if” scenario analysis; and strategy consulting from advisors with extensive domain and analytics expertise. “Effectively addressing the challenges of this... [Read More]
African Bank, a large retail bank in South Africa, recently went through a large-scale restructuring in order to bring more efficiency, transparency and collaboration to the way it made decisions. Working with FICO, the bank applied a standards-based decision management methodology to fully modernize its decision system. Now that the new solution has been implemented, we spoke with Dawid Van Zyl, Program Executive of Credit Decisioning at African Bank, to learn more. Q: What challenges was African Bank facing with its existing credit decision process? Dawid: Our credit decision lifecycle was fragmented over different applications and teams. This was causing inefficiencies and missed opportunities for our executives to react to the market. We knew we needed to do a complete overhaul of the existing process in order to be effective and profitable. Q: How did you and the FICO team create a solution for this challenge? Dawid: The first step... [Read More]
In another sign of the growing use of the cloud for fraud protection, EnterCard — one of the leading Scandinavian finance companies — will use the FICO® Falcon® Platform to combat card fraud and communicate with its 1.7 million customers. EnterCard is upgrading to a cloud-based version of Falcon to protect customers in Sweden, Norway and Denmark from fraud. “The cloud-based version of Falcon gives us greater flexibility to serve our customers with better fraud protection,” said Yannick Leclerc, head of fraud in EnterCard Group. “We will have greater control over how we communicate with customers when fraud is suspected, which will help us improve the customer journey in a fraud context.” For more information, read our news release.
Ever wonder how one of Chile’s largest retailers retains over 3 million customers? We asked Scotiabank Cencosud’s Claudia Guerrero, Model Development Manager of Risk Management in its Retail Finance division. In this Cencosud video, Claudia discusses how the retailer relies on a comprehensive, integrated credit portfolio management solution developed by FICO. This enables it to make better customer decisions, from originations through customer management. In particular, FICO® TRIAD® Customer Manager successfully manages risk-based strategies for credit line increases and cross-selling, and FICO® Model Builder has helped Scotiabank Cencosud cut model development times in half, while still retaining predictive strength — which the company sees as a tremendous competitive advantage. For more information, read the Cencosud case study or visit the FICO Model Management and Compliance solution page.
NBC Nightly News recently aired coverage where they examined two changes that could boost credit scores for millions of US consumers. The news agency examined last year’s announcement of FICO® Score XD, aimed at the millions of US consumers who otherwise cannot receive a FICO® Score due to insufficient or stale data in traditional credit bureau files. NBC News discussed how the new score leverages alternative data, such as utilities payments and wireless and cable bill payment history, to determine credit scores. And starting July 1, the three major credit reporting agencies are dropping certain negative information from credit reports, including tax liens and civil judgments. NBC Nightly News shares FICO estimates that 12 million consumers will see their FICO® Scores increase – although, roughly 11 million of these consumers will see only a slight score increase of less than 20 points. View the NBC Nightly News video: Changes to Credit... [Read More]
This is a guest post from Thomas H. Davenport and FICO’s Zahir Balaporia. A version of this post was also published on Data Informed. Businesses across many industries spend millions of dollars employing advanced analytics to manage and improve their supply chains. Businesses look to analytics to help with sourcing raw materials more efficiently, improving manufacturing productivity, optimizing inventory, minimizing distribution cost, and other related objectives. But the results can be less than satisfactory. It often takes too long to source the data, build the models and deliver the analytics based solutions to the multitude of decision makers in an organization. Sometimes key steps in the process are omitted completely. In other words, the solution for improving the supply chain – advanced analytics – suffers from the same problems that it aims to solve. Therefore, reducing inefficiencies in the analytics supply chain should be a critical component of any analytics initiative... [Read More]
Think of collections and most people think of angry phone calls and repossessed cars and homes. But what happens when you provide an essential service you can’t switch off? That’s the case for Thames Water, the UK’s largest provider of water and wastewater services, which uses technology to increase results. Thames Water has reduced bad debt by 11% in the last 12 months by innovating its collections process using FICO® Debt Manager™ solution. For its achievement, Thames Water has been awarded the FICO Decisions Award for Debt Management. “The introduction of Debt Manager 9 has allowed us to design our treatment strategies from the bottom-up — rather than building strategies to the system limitations, we built them to the business and customer needs,” said Ross Betts, Thames Water’s collections system, strategy & segmentation manager. “This program has been hugely successful, not least because it managed to implement several ambitious goals... [Read More]
With 2016 recently coming to a close, we took a look back to uncover which topics you – our blog readers – gravitated toward last year. Chief among your interests were analytic innovation, credit risk, regulatory compliance, customer experience and mobile payments. Here’s a recap of our top 10 most popular posts published in 2016: US Credit Quality Rising … The Beat Goes On – Ethan Dornhelm shares FICO research showing how US consumer credit quality continues to climb. Why Is Customer Experience So Hard to Explain? – For an organization to improve customer experience, here’s why everyone needs to start on the same page. 4 Analytic Predictions for 2017 – From Killer Devices to AI Hype – FICO Chief Analytics Officer Scott Zoldi shares his predictions for analytics trends and burning issues in 2017. Your Customer Experience Management Is SO Immature! – Roughly 80% of companies are customer experience... [Read More]
Ever wonder how students use analytics to become entrepreneurs? At Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., Students of Georgetown, Inc. – commonly known as “The Corp” – is the largest entirely student-run non-profit corporation in the world, with seven subsidiary companies generating annual revenues in excess of $5 million. As participants in the FICO Academic Engagement Program, Georgetown students were given the opportunity to analyze Big Data from their seven storefronts using some of the industry’s most widely used analytics tools. Watch the video to find out how The Corp leveraged their findings from FICO analytics to monitor customer behavior and improve sales.
