Banco Atlántida El Salvador Achieves 100% Digital Credit Card Onboarding Using FICO Platform

MIAMI – 22 April, 2026 – FICO (NYSE: FICO) 

Highlights:

• Banco Atlántida achieved 100% digital origination with average onboarding time under 10 minutes and sustained 6.3% monthly portfolio growth
• The bank delivered 85 Net Promoter Score for onboarding and processed over 25,000 credit card applications since April 2024
• Banco Atlántida El Salvador has won a 2026 FICO® Decision Award for Customer Onboarding and Management

Banco Atlántida El Salvador, part of one of Central America's most established financial groups, is using the industry-leading capabilities of FICO® Platform to transform its retail banking through groundbreaking digital innovation. The bank has achieved 100% digital credit card origination available 24/7 with the entire process, from application to activation, completed through their mobile app in under 10 minutes.

The bank uses the industry-leading capabilities of FICO® Platform to integrate over 10 external data sources and automatically evaluate applications through more than 400 decisioning rules, enabling instant credit card issuance during the onboarding process.

More information: https://www.fico.com/en/fico-platform

“We knew Salvadorans deserved better than the traditional banking experience of long forms and lengthy approval processes,” said Carlos Rosales, Chief Risk Officerat Banco Atlántida El Salvador. “Using FICO Platform, we built a 100% digital model that removes traditional barriers like paperwork and branch visits, while delivering personalized credit offers tailored to each individual customer.”

Three Obstacles to Digital-First Banking in El Salvador

When Banco Atlántida entered the Salvadoran market in 2017, the portfolio was heavily concentrated in loans to small and medium-sized enterprises, supported by manual origination processes. 

Launching with credit cards as the digital flagship product presented three major challenges: reliable data for decisioning, regulatory alignment for the digital-first proposal, and building market trust in a saturated credit card market with widespread distrust toward traditional banking. 

“We achieved an 85 Net Promoter Score for onboarding in 2025, with data orchestration completed in 50 seconds and decisioning in just 2.18 seconds,” added Rosales. “We then built trust and differentiated ourselves as a fresh approach in the market by using contracts written in plain language that customers can actually understand and a simple, intuitive product application process.”

Transforming Customer Experience Through Intelligent Automation

FICO Platform allows the bank to automatically evaluate whether applicants meet its risk appetite and to deliver personalized offers for credit limits and interest rates through more than 20 evaluation flows, multiple statistical income inference models, over 100 functions and 40 decision tables, and more than 400 rules for decisioning and product assignment. The process integrates directly with the bank’s card processor, enabling instant credit card issuance during onboarding.

The mobile application launched publicly in April 2024, and from the very first month, the platform delivered outstanding results. By July 2025, the credit card portfolio reached $7.7 million in approved limits, with $3.4 million in outstanding principal and 3,700 active accounts. The bank has processed more than 25,000 credit card applications since launch, with application volumes averaging 75 per day, all handled automatically without adding staff or cost.

“Banco Atlántida El Salvador has created a remarkable blueprint for digital banking transformation in Central America,” said Nikhil Behl, president, software at FICO. “When a bank can onboard customers in under 10 minutes and process 25,000 applications automatically with an 85 NPS, that shows what happens when you build technology around the customer experience rather than forcing customers to adapt to your systems.”  

For its achievements, Banco Atlántida won a 2026 FICO® Decision Award for Customer Onboarding and Management.

“Banco Atlántida turned a greenfield opportunity into a masterclass in digital banking,” said Lisa Morgan, technology journalist and contributor at InformationWeek and one of the FICO Decision Awards judges. “Their focus on plain language contracts and transparent pricing shows how technology can actually humanize banking rather than complicate it.”

About Banco Atlántida El Salvador
Banco Atlántida El Salvador is a trusted financial institution and member of Grupo Financiero Atlántida, providing comprehensive banking and financial services to individuals, companies, and entrepreneurs in El Salvador. The bank’s offerings include retail and business banking, credit, savings and investment products, and digital solutions designed to support financial inclusion and economic development across the country.

About the FICO® Decision Awards
The FICO Decision Awards recognize organizations that are achieving remarkable success using FICO solutions. A panel of independent judges with deep industry expertise evaluates nominations based upon measurable improvement in key metrics; demonstrated use of best practices; project scale, depth and breadth; and innovative uses of technology. The 2026 judges are:

• Sam Abadir, research director, risk & compliance, IDC Financial Insights
• Shrimanth Adla, senior director, credit risk strategy and analytics, Comcast
• Manoj Agrawal, group editor, Banking Frontiers
• Courtney Haan, strategic payments experience manager, Velera (Previous Winner)
• Shelly Kramer, principal analyst at Kramer & Company and theCube Research
• Andy Lawrie, credit risk tech lead at Nationwide Building Society (Previous Winner)
• Lisa Morgan, technology journalist and contributor at InformationWeek
• Déborah Oliveira, founder and editor-in-chief at IT Forum

The winners of the FICO Decision Awards will be spotlighted at and win tickets to FICO® World 2026, May 19-22, 2026, at the Signia By Hilton hotel, Orlando, Florida.

About FICO
FICO (NYSE: FICO) powers decisions that help people and businesses around the world prosper. Founded in 1956, the company is a pioneer in the use of predictive analytics and data science to improve operational decisions. FICO holds more than 200 US and foreign patents on technologies that increase profitability, customer satisfaction and growth for businesses in financial services, insurance, telecommunications, health care, retail and many other industries. Using FICO solutions, businesses in more than 80 countries do everything from protecting 4 billion payment cards from fraud, to improving financial inclusion, to increasing supply chain resiliency. The FICO® Score, used by 90% of top US lenders, is the standard measure of consumer credit risk in the US and has been made available in over 40 other countries, improving risk management, credit access and transparency.

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