Tag Archives: Decision Management

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]

“Should I stay or should I go now? Should I stay or should I go now? If I go there will be trouble An’ if I stay it will be double So come on and let me know Should I stay or should I go?” – The Clash The lyrics to the 1981 song “Should I Stay or Should I Go” by The Clash express the struggle in making what seems like a simple decision. The complexity increases when decisions are being made in organizations, because of the constraints, logic and significant impact they have on time and resources. To add to the challenges, other people in your organization may want to understand how you arrived at a decision, modify the logic that was used for the same application, or even make decisions in other scenarios with similar logic. Following someone else’s decision logic and maintaining consistency can be very... [Read More]

This blog is the final post in this series covering my FICO World keynote presentation, sharing the five steps organizations can take to improve their operational decision-making. 1. Capturing subject matter expertise 2. Intelligent solution creation 3. Faster insight to execution 4. Building institutional memory 5. Greater analytic accessibility In this blog I’ll cover the topic of greater analytic accessibility––which seems like it should be easy to achieve these days, but it is still elusive. In the age of the customer, Big Data is the key to intimately understanding customers’ desires and translating those desires into products, services and personalized experiences. This kind of differentiation is critical to companies’ achieving a competitive advantage. The challenge of Big Data is extracting meaningful, timely and actionable information from it at a reasonable cost. The complexities of doing so mean that two-thirds of businesses derive little or no tangible benefit from the information they hold. Only 4% of companies extract... [Read More]

Is your company seeing great success using analytics and decision management? We’re looking for success stories for the 2016 FICO Decisions Awards. These awards honor our clients’ strategic wins, use of best practices and innovative deployments of technology. Awards will be presented in six categories: Analytic Excellence, Customer Onboarding and Management, Debt Management, Decision Management Innovation, Fraud Control and Regulatory Compliance. To judge the awards, we’ve lined up a stellar panel of independent judges: Dan Ariely, expert on human behavior, author of Predictably Irrational, and Duke University Professor of Behavioral Economics Jim Bander, national manager, Decision Science, Toyota Financial Services (2015 winner) Ken Elliott, global director of Analytics, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Bill Fearnley, Jr., research director, Compliance, Fraud and Risk Analytics, IDC – Financial Insights Petr Kapoun, retail risk director, Česká Spořitelna (2015 winner) Dr. Dalvinder Singh, editor, Financial Regulation International Nicole Sturgill, principal, Executive Advisor, CEB TowerGroup Nominations are... [Read More]

This is my fourth of five blogs expanding on the key points of my FICO World 2016 address. Through these blogs I’m exploring the fundamental ways organizations need to improve their operational decision-making. Organizations can reduce complexity and create competitive advantage through: 1. Capturing subject matter expertise 2. Intelligent solution creation 3. Faster insight to execution 4. Building institutional memory 5. Greater analytic accessibility Let’s talk about institutional memory. How Elephants Survive In my FICO World presentation I included a slide with a photo of elephants—not the usual stuff of a corporate deck. But a tale about elephant survival in Tanzania’s Tarangire Park provides a valuable allegory for business. The Wildlife Conservation Society examined patterns of elephant calf mortality during the park’s drought of 1993. The drought was the region’s most severe in over 40 years. Sadly, during a nine-month period of that year, 16 out of 81 elephant calves died. This mortality rate of... [Read More]

I’m continuing my blog series, taking a deeper dive into the core concepts of the keynote I delivered at FICO World 2016 in Washington, DC. Those concepts capture the five critical areas that organizations need to improve, to fundamentally enhance operational decision-making: 1. Capturing subject matter expertise 2. Intelligent solution creation 3. Faster insight to execution 4. Building institutional memory 5. Greater analytic accessibility Let’s look at the critical effect of gaining faster insight to execution, and how modern software solutions like FICO® Decision Management Suite 2.0 (DMS) catalyze this advantage. Fresh Insights Business isn’t run on a static set of facts; the knowledge we use to make business decisions is constantly evolving. At FICO we build solutions to reflect that reality by giving business users the ability to quickly adapt, test and modify strategies. Business analysts may want to test how previous decisions can be improved with champion/challenger, and when fresh insight is generated... [Read More]

This is my second blog in a series of five, recapping the key principles in my talk at FICO World 2016. Those five principles can transform the way organizations can create and deploy analytically powered applications: 1. Capturing subject matter expertise 2. Accelerating intelligent solution creation 3. Faster insight to execution 4. Building institutional memory 5. Greater analytic accessibility With this blog I’ll dive into accelerating intelligent solution creation, and how it helps enterprise IT organizations to significantly reduce the complexity of solution creation. Less Legacy…More Innovation Legacy applications consume an extraordinary amount of IT dollars; only 16% of IT budgets go to innovation. Today, innovation dollars are getting further reduced and all the new innovative applications built this year will need to be maintained in the following years. Most companies underestimate the complexity and cost of maintaining applications, and find themselves with less and less dollars and personnel to innovate. That’s where Rapid Application... [Read More]

Missed FICO World 2016? Then you won’t want to miss this video of the FICO World keynote from Stuart Wells, FICO’s chief technology and products officer. Wells explained that after 50 years of technological innovation, we’re facing a global productivity crisis, with complexity – from regulation, security threats, competition and failed Big Data deployments – choking performance. Per Wells, these challenges call for an overhaul of the way businesses approach decisions, and he outlined what such an approach would look like. Note: click on the graphic above to view the video.