100 patents that changed banking

FICO has just hit a major innovation milestone — we have now been granted 100 patents over the past 20 years. You can read the news release and watch a FICO Tech Talk, but I’d also like to point out the significance of these patents in financial services alone.

These patents truly chart the application of predictive analytics and Decision Management technology, particularly in banking. Among the solutions that benefit from the innovations in these patents are three that transformed the banking industry over the last 20 years:

• The FICO® Score, the world’s most used credit score, which is the standard measure of U.S. consumer credit risk, used by lenders, regulators, rating agencies and consumers.
• FICO™ Falcon® Fraud Manager, which protects more than 2 billion cards worldwide, and has saved issuers more than $10 billion in the US alone.
• FICO® TRIAD® Customer Manager, which is used to manage 2/3 of credit cards worldwide, and introduced the practice of champion/challenger strategy testing to credit account management.

Our goal at FICO Labs isn’t just to do cool research. It’s to create industry-changing products like these. With our new work in areas like healthcare fraud and patient adherence analytics, we think we have a good shot at changing the way even more companies make decisions. And with our accelerating pace of innovation — about one-quarter of the patents were issued this year alone — those changes may come soon.