What Is Decision Intelligence Software and Should You Invest in It?

For decades, FICO has empowered banks, financial services firms, telecommunications companies, insurers, and clients across many industries to automate and optimize their operational decisions through automation and optimization. This has matured into a technology framework called FICO Platform which has become the backbone of digital transformation for leading organizations around the world.  FICO Platform facilitates the alignment and contribution of every department, application, employee, and partner in the enterprise to deliver tangible business results. Explaining such a comprehensive platform to clients and prospects can be complex—but recent industry reports such as Gartner’s report, Market Guide for Decision Intelligence Platforms are bringing clarity to the conversation.

Indeed, between this report and the new “IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Decision Intelligence Platforms 2024 Vendor Assessment,” a clearer vision is emerging about what decision intelligence software is, how it can add tremendous value to businesses, and which companies are leveraging it to outpace their competitors.

How Gartner and IDC Define Decision Intelligence Software

In its 23-page report, Gartner provides a deep dive into the discipline of decision intelligence and explains the platform capabilities that support it:

• Decision intelligence – A practical discipline used to improve decision-making by explicitly understanding and engineering how decisions are made and how outcomes are evaluated, managed and improved by feedback. The Gartner report noted that, “one-third (33%) of the organizations surveyed for the 2024 Gartner CDAO Agenda Survey have already deployed decision intelligence, with 17% committed to pilot within six months, 19% considering deployment in six to 12 months and 25% investigating deployment in 12 to 24 months. Only 7% stated no interest.”
• Decision intelligence platforms - Software used to create solutions that support, automate, and augment decision-making powered by the composition of data, analytics, knowledge and artificial intelligence techniques. As the report discusses, these systems have collaborative capabilities for decision modeling, execution, and monitoring. These platforms are used to design decision-centric solutions, explicitly model decisions, orchestrate decision execution, and evaluate and govern decisions and audit their outcomes.

Similarly, IDC describes the decision intelligence platform category as “software technology that helps organizations design, engineer, and orchestrate decisions by fully or partially automating all the steps in the decision-making process,” including decision design, decision engineering, and decision orchestration.

Synthesizing these analysts’ views, decision intelligence software features:

• Data ingestion and access – connect to and bring in data from a diverse ecosystem of external and internal sources
• Feature management – transform ingested data into a robust and business-friendly foundation of data attributes that are broadly shareable and well governed, ideally by businesspeople
• Advanced analytics, including machine learning and AI – create or import, and execute diverse analytic models to derive differentiated insights that inform better business decisions
• Decision automation – provide decision structures like rulesets, decision trees, decision tables, and decision models to enable businesspeople to define their risk appetite, enforce business policy, experiment with product strategy, and scale operational choices with precision, auditability, and consistency
• Exception management – route iffy situations and tougher decisions to an experienced team of human exerts, entrusting experienced employees with the edge cases that are most deserving of their time and attention
• Communication functions – contact and engage with customers using preferred channels and timing
• Simulation – evaluate end-to-end decision strategies against actual historical scenarios to understand likely results and safely iterate without putting the business at risk, and study the potential effects of “what if”  to proactively fortify the resilience of the business
• Decision optimization – determine the ideal decision strategy to meet stated objectives within stated constraints using mathematical optimization
• Reporting – feedback loop to monitor performance and make rapid adjustments to improve results

Here is a high-level view of the capabilities in FICO Platform:

Two terms that people frequently confuse with decision intelligence software are:

• Business intelligence software. BI software focuses on gathering, organizing, and summarizing data in ways that help managers make management-level decisions.  These tend to be more manual and less frequent. BI is not designed to automate operational-level decisions for the business.  .
• Decision support systems. As implied by the word ‘support’, DSS are also not designed to make decisions on behalf of the business. They are like BI in certain respects, but are more focused on a vertical domain such as fleet management, insurance fraud, or institutional investing to name a few. Within its scope of specialization, a DSS is designed to help human experts determine the right course of action, which is why a knowledge base is often considered an important feature of a DSS and where GenAI is well-suited to play an increasingly important role.

5 Key Benefits of Decision Intelligence Software Platforms

These analyst reports highlight five critical benefits of decision intelligence software platforms that are important for organizations.

1 Manage increasing business complexity

Business decision-making is increasingly complex, interconnected and continuous in most organizations, due to global competition, more disruptions, more demanding customers, the accelerated pace of digital business, as well as growing awareness and regulatory pressure regarding fairness and transparency.

Gartner wrote that “with more disruptions, more competition, more digital business, more regulation and more demanding customers, decisions need to be more accurate, contextual, transparent, responsive and scalable — all at the same time.” FICO shares this perspective; as clients proceed on their digital transformation journey, we encourage them to “work backwards from the decision.” This helps them identify all of the inputs and decision assets that must be continually updated, verified, and synchronized to ensure optimal decisions even amid rapidly evolving market conditions.  This is embedded in FICO’s decision modelling approach.

2 Balance scalability and transparency with personalized decisions

The overall demand for decision intelligence platforms is expected to grow, the reports say, driven by pressure on organizations to make their decisions more scalable and transparent, yet more contextualized and personalized.  This must be achieved in a business environment that is being continually disrupted by global competition and emancipated consumers and citizens.

These Gartner findings certainly mirror our experience at FICO: the number of companies using FICO Platform for enterprise decisioning has grown from a dozen to 130+ in the past 48 months or so; clients are quickly achieving dramatic results in their digital agendas, customer acquisitions, and efficiency ratios.

3 Break through technology and information silos

To improve decision quality, fragmented, non-contextualized, data-deficient choices should not be the ones we are automating and scaling. Furthermore, fixing this is not possible on splintered business unit-level systems, department-level data science predictions or a variety of other, silo-induced blind spots.

At FICO, we help clients implement a unified, scalable decision platform across the enterprise to optimize and monetize decision-making. By unifying and leveraging all available information and applying a collection of different techniques and algorithms, a platform connects the dots and fills in the holes in decisioning processes to ensure better decisions at every customer touchpoint across the lifecycle, to iteratively improve the quality of decisions over time. This also ensures a cohesive, all-inclusive customer experience that promotes customer engagement.

4 Compete using AI and machine learning integrated into decision intelligence

The growing power of AI offers game-changing opportunities to bring decision-making to a higher level of strategic competitive differentiation.

However, most organizations find it challenging to turn the promise of AI into reality, often due to a disconnect between technological possibilities and operational decision-making at the point-of-contact with the customer.  Gartner further recommends that, “Bring decision-making to a higher, more situational and adaptive level by using the power of more advanced decision intelligence platforms that incorporate techniques such as simulation, AI agents or GenAI. This will allow for more cross-functional decision optimization and for greater resilience and autonomy in business operations.”

By empowering business users to take more control of their AI-powered decisions, they can make better trade-offs and choose better actions.  By reducing their dependence on IT, a platform unclogs bottlenecks and enables everyone to move faster.  It effectively combines the “book smarts” of the IT organization with the “street smarts” of the business to accelerate learning cycles across a wider range of scenarios to swiftly respond to shifts in business conditions while remaining timely, personalized, and highly relevant in every customer moment.

5 Empower business users to improve decisions

Decision intelligence platforms are seen as critical in dealing with 21st century challenges of existing enterprise decision-making as well as in enabling novel ways to differentiate.

Gartner further mentions that “by combining the power of human ingenuity with the ability of AI to deal with much more data, dimensions and decision factors than any one human can, higher and game-changing levels of decision-making lie within reach.” Again, we think FICO’s vision of not just a human-led, but a business user-led enterprise decisioning strategy ensures all of the benefits of a symbiotic people/ process/ technology approach to decisioning and digital maturity. Gartner said that, “with growing versatility and sophistication of decision intelligence platforms, more automation and augmentation of decision making become ever more feasible.”

We think this report reinforces what we at FICO have been advocating for years, the need for a holistic approach to making decisions, powered by innovations in data management, AI, analytics and more.

Use Cases Demonstrate the Power and Flexibility

In my paper for the Journal of Digital Banking, I outlined “How Financial Services Leaders Are Using Enterprise Intelligence to Optimize Efficiency Ratios”. The nine broad use cases there apply to financial services, but from these you can get a sense of how such software platforms can be transformative in other industries as well.

While the results achieved vary in scope and kind, what these companies all saw was the transformative power of a single, interconnected platform that powered their customer connections, driven by analytics fuelled by a much more robust and comprehensive set of customer data sources.

In that paper I also presented the cases of seven leading banks from around the world that have applied FICO Platform – and the benefits they have achieved. Here are those benefits in a nutshell.

1: Global Multinational Bank

• Prioritized efficiency with centralized and consolidated all systems across the bank
• 50% reduction in time to market of new projects, decision strategies and analytic models and 80% lower internal costs for development, strategy updates and training
• 60% decreased dependency on IT by empowering business users to implement new strategies
• 70% decline in incidents with operational risk

2: Large EMEA Bank

• Deployed a new decisioning system at 30% time savings and 25% cost savings, improving efficiency
• Transformed a projected loss to US$6.5m profit in less than 6 months
• Implemented new customer scoring strategies in just 1 week
• 50% faster go-lives, reduced testing times and slashed time to make changes from 2 months to 2 days, while reducing expected costs by 25%
• Enabled champion/challenger testing in credit risk, profiling, product specification and offer strategy

3. Leading NORAM Bank

• Incorporated existing customer relationship data into a new all-encompassing database to get a complete view of each customer
• Enhanced legacy decisioning system across 60 decisioning areas enterprise-wide
• Empowered business users to manage change at the speed of business
• Shortened cycle times significantly while improving loan quality and lowering risk
• Can run side-by-side adjudication strategies

4: Large APAC Bank

• Perfecting instant, customer-centric digital decision management
• New capabilities enabled bank to quickly expand into new customer segments while increasing the profitability of existing customer relationships
• Business users able to generate new dashboards and reports quickly, without IT involvement
• Launched new digital business, starting with personal loan portfolio
• Quickly met or exceeded the offerings of competing Fintechs

5: Major Latin American Bank

• More effective communication with customers and dramatically improved customer experience
• More agile decisions and customer focus; higher synergy between departments
• 90% reduction in the time required to confirm transactions
• 20% gross fraud reduction
• Increased volume of credit line management 3x
• Operational risk and expense reduction

6: Global Payments Processor

• Single underwriting/decision management platform that can scale across verticals, product lines and regions, which helps to accelerate future growth, acquisitions and global expansion
• Increased approval rates nearly 60%
• Drastically reduced induction from several days to a few minutes, resulting in improved customer experience and accelerated business growth
• Streamlined risk strategy and user-driven rules management
• Increased accuracy to reduce portfolio risk, cut costs and minimize fraud
• Roll out new innovations and applications: tiered underwriting, underwriting-as-a-service and consumer underwriting application

7: Top US Credit Card Company

• Deployed a common platform for decision management, while processing billions of transactions monthly across all channels
• Automated decision management for ROI of 20:1 or higher in the first year
• Accelerated application development, speeding solution delivery by up to 10x
• Common enterprise-wide framework, easily accessible and usable by business users
• Reduced time-to-change and create greater competitive advantage earlier

Case Study – the Bradesco “Brain”

An excellent example of this kind of software at work is Bradesco, the second largest bank in Brazil, which has created a system known as the Bradesco Brain, powered by FICO Platform. Bradesco uses this system to create hyper-personalized customer journeys, based on analysis of data from across the bank, predictions of customer needs and responses, and automated decision-making. Bradesco’s hyper-personalized credit strategy has seen excellent results: including 30+ million visits per month to Bradesco’s loan menu, with more than half of users applying for a loan, a conversion rate of over 30% and very high customer reviews.

In a FICO World 2024 presentation, Marcelo Perego, Product Manager at Bradesco, shared three real-life examples of Bradesco Brain in action:

1. Marie’s Loan for a Birthday Party, Marie needed a loan of 8,000 reais (about $1,500) to organize her daughter’s birthday party. When she accessed her credit menu on the Bradesco site, she was asked, “How much do you need?” Marie entered the amount, and “in real time, our FICO Platform identifies solutions for her, taking into account her credit rating and needs,” said Perego. This personalized credit offer resulted in an immediate, customized solution.
   1. Juan’s Refinancing Opportunity. Juan, who had lost his job, faced challenges with two low-balance contracts, including one installment five days overdue. “Bradesco’s decision engine identified this behavior and recommended refinancing for him,” Perego explained. “Juan could extend the term with a lower installment, and the best solution was presented in his credit menu.” This approach reduced risk for Bradesco and supported Juan’s financial needs.
   2. Rodrigo’s Seamless Digital Experience. Rodrigo preferred speaking directly with his account manager but couldn’t visit the bank. His manager applied for a loan, making the contract available for review and acceptance via the Bradesco app. “Rodrigo saw the offer, checked the conditions, accepted the contract, and the amount was immediately released into his account,” Perego noted, showing how Bradesco’s omnichannel strategy delivers convenience and enhances customer satisfaction.

For more information, read this blog post: Bradesco Boosts Conversions with Hyper-Personalized Credit Solutions.

Exploring Decision Intelligence Software

Gartner deserves kudos for explaining decision intelligence and decision intelligence platforms in such deep detail and great clarity. I would encourage anyone in the midst of a digital transformation effort or exploring an enterprise decisioning solution for their company to get a copy. The IDC Marketplace report is also extremely informative.

Speaking of third-party analyst validation, Forrester also publishes an excellent review of offerings in this space, called the Forrester AI Decisioning Platforms Wave. While the Gartner report lists the names of 30 vendors in the marketspace, the Forrester version provides in-depth Consumer Reports-like ranking and comparison of the top dozen or so. And I am proud to add that FICO is the only vendor to earn “Leader” status in every Forrester AI Decisioning Platforms Wave since they’ve been published.

Among other things, these analyst firms agree: the choice to invest in decision intelligence software is a wise one and the time is now. 

Learn How FICO Platform Can Power Your Digital Transformation and Boost Collaboration

• Explore banking innovation with FICO Platform
• View retail banking customer testimonials on the FICO YouTube channel
• Watch the video “FICO® Platform: Applied Intelligence, when and where it matters”
• See clients discuss their use of FICO Platform
• Read my article on banking innovation in The Journal of Digital Banking, “How Financial Services Leaders Are Using Enterprise Intelligence to Optimize Efficiency Ratios”
• Watch FICO Platform in action with the story of everyday consumer Digital Jane