Navigating Risk Management with Machine Learning

Santander has transformed its credit risk assessment processes using FICO® Platform and its applied analytics and machine learning capabilities. Santander, which manages a $60 billion asset portfolio and serves over three million customers, is using FICO Platform to streamline model development, improve governance, and enhance predictive analytics in response to evolving market conditions. 

For more information on FICO Platform, visit: https://www.fico.com/en/fico-platform. 

“The FICO team has been instrumental in enabling the Auto business to use a unified platform to be more efficient and accelerate our timelines. FICO helped our modeling team reduce the number of tasks, allowing for our data team to focus on interpreting the analytics,” said Bruce Jackson, head of the Santander US Auto Business and CEO of Santander Consumer. 

Watch Santander US tell their story on video: 

Santander is using FICO Platform to empower consumer credit risk in three primary functions: approving or declining credit applicants, assigned adverse action, and assessing the probability of default for use in pricing models. This allows the business to assess more applications for auto loans. The platform allows Santander to deploy machine learning and advanced analytics to drive business decisions and get new predictive models and strategies into production to keep pace with changing customer and market dynamics.  

Adapting to the Impact of Credit Risks in Auto Lending

With rising interest rates and increased vehicle prices impacting affordability, Santander needed a more agile risk assessment framework. Legacy tools required manual, time-consuming recalibrations, delaying credit analysis and limiting the ability to respond quickly to market shifts. 

“What impressed me was how Santander transformed a slow, manual process into a seamless, real-time system,” said Joe McKendrick, analyst and senior contributor at Forbes and one of the FICO Decision Awards judges. “It didn’t just tweak its risk models—Santander overhauled how it makes decisions, making them faster, smarter, and more reliable.” 

For its achievements, Santander Consumer USA has won a 2025 FICO® Decisions Award for AI, Machine Learning & Optimization. 

To see the full list of 2025 FICO Decisions Awards winners, check out: https://www.fico.com/en/decisionawards 

How FICO Can Help Transform Auto Finance

The auto finance landscape is shifting fast. As interest rates rise and borrowers face greater financial pressure, auto lenders, including credit unions and other financial institutions, need to adapt. FICO Platform helps modernize every stage of the auto lending lifecycle — from auto loan originations to how you underwrite risk in real time.

See how leading auto lenders are staying ahead:

• Explore the latest automotive lending trends, from digital origination to smarter credit risk management in our blog outlining Six Trends Transforming the Auto Finance Landscape.
• Learn how AI can tailor lending decisions and improve the borrower experience across channels in our piece about The Future of AI and Hyper-Personalization in Auto Loan Finance.
• Discover how Volvo accelerated auto loan originations, helping teams underwrite efficiently and reduce processing delays — a model for today’s market, where debt loads are rising and speed matters. Volvo used FICO Platform to cut the credit check process on applicants from three days down to seconds.