Benjamin Baer

FICO and many other companies have sent out messages to support the dramatic personal and market changes underway due to the COVID-19 pandemic.  Clearly this health crisis and the resulting economic disruption has fundamentally changed the way that organizations establish, build, and retain relationships with their customers. In much the same way as we’ve been…

5 Best Practices for Connecting Data and Analytics to Business Process The need for competitive advantage sees companies increasingly turning to analytics to operationalize their data. Leveraging analytics from insight to artificial intelligence (AI), business leaders can make sense of their rapidly-growing piles of data to improve operations. Benjamin Baer shares 5…

Over the last year FICO has been actively engaged with Amazon Web Services to broaden its software portfolio deployment options to include the AWS public cloud.  We have seen significant progress as we have rolled out support for FICO^® Customer Communication Service (CCS), and FICO^® Tonbeller AML solutions on AWS. Both solutions achieved Amazon Web Services (AWS) Fina…

Prescriptive analytics, as the name suggests, is an output or a service that delivers a customized “what should I offer” response to real-time data and predictions on user or customer behavior.  Unlike predictive analytics, which suggest what a customer is likely to do (or not do) based on data, prescriptive analytics takes that prediction and maps it to a business pr…

For decades, businesses have been leveraging technology to automate large parts of their operations – accounting, manufacturing, supply chains and customer relationships. In the most recent chapter of this story, business and government agencies have been doing amazing things with cloud computing, Big Data and analytics. However, it is estimated that 85 percent of org…

For many years FICO has been an industry leader in consumer and small business credit origination.  We’ve developed a number of analytically driven applications to speed the time from customer application to close. If you’re in the financial services business, you probably are very comfortable with the term origination.  If not, you may not even know what the term me…

A few years ago, following his success in predicting the results of the 2008 election, poll analyst Nate Silver wrote a book called The Signal and the Noise.  The book outlined his approach to understanding the limitations of polling to represent an elections ultimate outcome.  By better understanding what and to whom pollsters ask questions, he devised a methodology…

As we settle down with our families to enjoy the winter holidays, many of us will be celebrating various traditions. For many, the culmination of the season is waking on December 25th to the excited cheers of their children as they see their Christmas horde waiting under the tree.  These children believe that Santa Claus, despite carrying what must be a massive load,…

In the movies, the machines will become our enemies. In The Terminator, the rise of the machines leads to an apocalyptic future; in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Frank is murdered and Dave is locked out of the spaceship by HAL; and in The Matrix, humans are used as a power supply after the sun is blacked out. No wonder we’re a bit afraid of the machines. While these machine…

By Benjamin Baer Not too long ago, deploying advanced analytics required massive investments in IT infrastructure and application software, creating a sort of “analytic elitism.” Over the last year we’ve been focused on democratizing analytics, so that organizations of all sizes can base their operational decisions on data. And to do this we needed to build our own c…

By Benjamin Baer How did the worst attended Major League Soccer (MLS) team turn it around, now packing an average of 19,709 people into its stadium that seats 18,467, with a waiting list for its 14,000 season tickets? It did it by turning insights (data that told it what was keeping its fans away) into actions (making its stadium feel more like a couch). Sporting Ka…

By Benjamin Baer Analytics is becoming a competitive necessity to businesses. Knowing what decisions to make, when to make them, and how to optimize them for maximum impact is the difference between an industry leader or an also ran.  Whether the decision is about pricing, packaging (it’s only within the last ten or so years that technology companies have consi…