Fraud Protection & Compliance
One of the hottest hot beds of innovation is artificial intelligence to combat financial crime, fraud and cyber risks while helping financial services organizations comply with security, privacy and data protection regulations. An immense amount of R&D investment is being focused in this area, producing a stream of new products.
With so much activity by so many, how is it FICO was again named #1 in Innovation compared to 100 other companies in the 2020 results of what Chartis describes as “the most comprehensive independent study of the world’s major players in risk and compliance technology”?
It may seem like an oxymoron, but I think it’s because FICO has made a habit of innovating. FICO also won the #1 spots for both artificial intelligence and cyber risk quantification—both for the second consecutive year. And FICO’s overall ranking among the 100 rose again, from #7 to #6.
Cyber risk quantification is a fairly new area of technology. Artificial intelligence has been around a long time, so that’s where you can best see FICO’s habit of innovation. As far back as 1988, FICO introduced the first Explainable AI reason reporter. In 2019, we incorporated the Explainable AI toolkit in our Financial Crimes Studio. These tools interrogate models—including those auto-generated by machine learning algorithms—to explain their predictions in human-understandable form. In between, FICO produced innovations that earned over 100 patents in machine learning and other AI technologies.
Explainable AI is critical today, given rising concerns about the increasing role machine learning is playing in every corner of our business and personal lives. Did you see this recent New York Times article on the massively scary way human biases are being taught to AI systems? The more AI permeates our society, the more we need to be able to understand the hows and whys behind its recommendations and decisions.
For that to happen, companies like FICO that deeply understand AI and have a long “habit” of AI innovation, need to open up our technology and make it more widely available. In 2019 we’ve begun to do just that: In September, we introduced FICO® Falcon® X, which includes an Instant ML toolkit enabling users to build their own solutions with AI components—including collaborative learners, multi-layer self-calibrating models and neural network models—that power FICO’s own decision management solutions.
That’s a whole new level of innovation, and there’s more to come. We’re building more advanced analytics into all of our decision management solutions and toolkits. After all, old habits are hard to break.
