Westpac NZ Boosts Hyper-Personalization With FICO Platform
Leading New Zealand bank with more than 1.5 million customers wins FICO Pioneer Award for its advanced decision innovation
Westpac New Zealand has won the 2024 FICO® Decisions Pioneer Award, for using the industry-leading capabilities of FICO® Platform to advance hyper-personalization capabilities and accelerate digital service innovation.
The New Zealand bank’s partnership with FICO has resulted in major improvements in automated decision processes, which has been reflected in better customer engagement and faster implementation of new projects across the bank.
"With FICO Platform we've been able to shift from focusing on individual decisions we make on a customer’s account, to thinking strategically about how we manage customers across all of their accounts and throughout their lifetime with the bank,” said Regan Goble, Risk Analytics Senior Manager at Westpac NZ.
“We are proud to be FICO Platform pioneers because the software provides a solution capable of accommodating the diverse use cases across our banking operations. We can now rapidly build, test, deploy and customize automated decision models to keep up with our customer expectations and regulatory requirements as the banking industry evolves,” said Goble.
You can read more about this story in the full media release.
The New Zealand bank expanded its use of FICO Platform throughout the past year to support a range of banking functions, this enterprise-wide implementation included teams across collections and credit to business strategy.
“What’s truly exciting is the pace at which we can innovate and make improvements to benefit our customers,” Goble emphasized. “We’ve more than doubled our decision model and programme deployments in the last two years, including enhancements, new services and regulatory change responses.”
A Pioneer in Enterprise-Wide Decisioning
The comprehensive consolidation of decision assets and data into a unified platform has allowed Westpac NZ to deliver tangible benefits to its banking customers through hyper-personalization and increased agility.
When Cyclone Gabrielle and other severe weather events hit New Zealand in early 2023, the bank was able to quickly respond by augmenting its collections and contact strategy.
“With the support of rich, centralized data and analytics capabilities, we are better positioned to quickly stand up new services for customers facing challenges such as natural disasters, or more recently cost-of-living pressures,” said Goble.
Additionally, when new regulations in New Zealand mandated updated reporting requirements and lending practices, Westpac NZ was able to use FICO Platform to act swiftly.
“We leveraged FICO’s expertise and utilized its highly configurable platform to develop, test, and deploy the new decision service within a quarter, when previously this may have taken at least 12 months,” emphasized Goble.
More Efficient and Engaging Customer Communications
Westpac NZ has also used FICO Platform’s omni-channel engagement capability to make the most of its customer information, significantly increasing its contact with customers.
“Our newly enhanced, data-driven collections and contact strategy is already helping us increase digital customer engagement, reduce operational costs and support customers through financial uncertainty,” concluded Goble.
“Westpac NZ is a worthy winner of FICO’s Pioneer Award accolade because it responded to the need to modernize and replace end-of-life technology with a strategic investment that enhances capabilities across the entire bank with outstanding results,” said Andrew Birmingham, technology editor for Mi3 Australia and one of the FICO Decisions Awards judges.
To see the full list of this year’s FICO® Decision Awards winners, check out: https://www.fico.com/en/fico-decisions-awards-2024
How FICO Can Help You With Hyper-Personalization
- Hear from FICO Platform customers, in this blog and video, about their digital transformation success stories.
- Read this report from Forrester called Unlocking Hyper-Personalization At Hyper-Scale
- Read this blog from Bill Waid on How to Unlock the Power of Hyper-Personalization
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<p>FICO’s latest research on <a href="http://www.fico.com/en/blogs/risk-compliance/us-credit-quality-rising-the-beat-goes-on/" target="_blank">national FICO® Score distribution</a> shows that US credit quality continues to trend upwards, with an increasing number of consumers scoring in the highest scores ranges. Given that, we decided it was time to refresh our study on “<a href="http://www.fico.com/en/blogs/risk-compliance/infographic-what-does-a-high-credit-scorer-look-like/" target="_blank">FICO® Score high achievers</a>,” where we examine the credit behavioural profiles of consumers with higher credit scores.</p> <p>As expected, our latest study showed that older people generally have higher scores, as has been the case in our <a href="http://www.fico.com/en/blogs/risk-compliance/age-before-beauty-credit-worthiness-before-youth/" target="_blank">past research</a>. 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I further broke this down by looking at the characteristics of the youngest 15% in each group, which occurs at age 29 for the 750-799 group and 43 for the 800-850. We used FICO<strong>®</strong> Score 9 for our analysis, and examined typical variables of the categories that go into the make-up of the score.</p> <p><a href="http://www.fico.com/en/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/FICO-Score-High-Achiever-table.png"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-29367" src="http://www.fico.com/en/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/FICO-Score-High-Achiever-table.png" alt="fico-score-high-achiever-table" width="715" height="747" /></a></p> <p>Since there’s a lot to dissect in this chart, I’ll highlight a few findings that struck me: <ul> <li><strong>Credit history.</strong> Higher scores are undoubtedly associated with a longer time on file. What’s striking is the higher average time on file for the 800+ group, both overall and for revolving accounts (the most common trade line). Clearly, it helps to start credit use early in life – but that’s not the sole determining factor for high scoring. The younger cohorts in both the 800+ and 750-799 groups have time on file medians significantly less than their older counterparts.</li> <li><strong>New credit.</strong> High credit scorers do, in fact, pursue new credit. We see little variation in months since last trade line opening and last inquiry among all groups observed.</li> <li><strong>Pay on time.</strong> As you might expect, the further in the past the delinquency, the higher the score – and that’s <u>if</u> a delinquency ever happened. 95% of the 800+ people and 72% of the 750-799 group have never been delinquent, which is a striking contrast to the 57% for the total population. The percentages for the younger groups are even higher, especially so for the 750-799ers. Collection items are also scarce for these high scorers. While 23% of the national population have collection items greater than $99, the figures are only 0.5% for the 800+ group and 3% for the 750-799 group. It is clear that, in conjunction with starting a credit file early, paying on time is a key trait of the FICO® Score high achiever.</li> <li><strong>Balance and utilization.</strong> Finally, we look at how credit is being used, focusing on revolving product use. (Since most people only have one mortgage or one auto loan, variation in instalment product figures is minimal and driven by payment history, which is near perfect for high scorers, as we’ve seen.) FICO® Score high achievers tend to have more open revolving accounts. While the % active trades and utilization are generally lower, by no means do high scorers avoid the use of credit products. What drives the difference here is the amount of <u>available</u> revolving credit utilized. The 800+ group is roughly 1/4 of the national median, both in total and on their highest utilized card; they also have lower balances and more cards<em>. </em>The 750-799 group is more active and higher utilized, but still only at 2/3 of the national figures. The young 750-799 group compensate with lower revolving balances and, as a result, lower utilization, which is in line with what we see for the 800+ group.</li> <li><strong>Benchmarks.</strong> I’d like to point out that while this study provides good benchmarks of the typical credit traits of the FICO® Score high achiever, individual credit profiles will vary widely. And keep in mind that when we sort groups of consumers as a whole by different behaviours, some results may look superficially odd. For example, the 800+ band has a longer median average open account time (128 months) than average revolving months on file (140 months).</li> </ul> So, what do we conclude? A huge takeaway is that high scorers don’t have too much in the way of serious delinquencies and negative public record data.</p> <p>In most respects, the young 800+ people are like their peer group. They really only differ markedly in their shorter credit history and higher non-mortgage balance, both of which are a function of life stage. Our results show that you don’t have to be a credit product hermit; these high scorers have more credit cards. The takeaway is to start credit activity early and maintain well-managed and moderate usage.</p> <p>In many ways, the young 750-799 people are more interesting because their age profile is much younger. Their credit characteristics differ more from their peer group, particularly in terms of length of credit history. They compensate by having almost pristine credit records and lower balances.</p> <p>Ultimately, 39% of US consumers are FICO® Score high achievers, which they accomplish by following common-sense credit practices. It ain’t rocket science!</p>
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