Fair Isaac Announces First Strategy Science Implementation in Asia at ICICI Bank
Strategy Science is Fair Isaac's proprietary methodology for determining optimal decision strategies by using advanced analysis capabilities. India's second-largest bank and largest retail credit provider will apply Strategy Science for Acquisitions to take a more precise, data-guided approach to its origination strategy design, enabling the lender to substantially grow its retail credit portfolio while keeping losses under control at target levels.
"ICICI Bank is truly breaking new ground by becoming the first financial services provider in Asia to implement Fair Isaac's market-proven strategy optimization methodology," said Chisoo Lyons, vice president of Analytics at Fair Isaac. "Strategy Science will play a key role in giving the bank a sustainable competitive edge, meeting the rapidly growing consumer demand for credit and helping shape the future of how customer decisions are made throughout India and other emerging markets in Asia."
By expanding the application of analytics beyond predictions to making optimal decisions under a complex set of constraints, Strategy Science will help ICICI Bank quickly design, test and refine individual account strategies. With Strategy Science, strategic options are clearly and concisely defined and openly identified. As a result, ICICI's portfolio managers can fully understand how their choice of a particular strategy will play out against the business objective they seek to optimize. For example, the bank will be able to hold losses from non-performing assets to well below average industry levels. By using Strategy Science, ICICI Bank can experiment with any number of "what if" scenarios before settling on precisely the right strategy to meet its growth objectives.
"Making smarter decisions for each new and existing customer are among the most significant challenges we face as we rapidly expand our retail credit portfolio," said Madhivanan Balakrishnan, General Manager, Retail Assets Product Group at ICICI Bank. "That is why we turned again to Fair Isaac for its industry-leading analytics and decision management solutions. Strategy Science allows us to be substantially more informed and precise when it comes to developing more profitable decision strategies that both match our needs for growth of our business while reducing our exposure to risk."
India, as the world's second most populous nation and Asia's third largest economy, continues to be one of the fastest-growing credit markets in the world. The country's credit card market has been growing at more than 30 percent annually. The middle class in India has been estimated at between 150 and 200 million households, fueling a boom in consumer credit.
Fair Isaac has been working with ICICI Bank since 2000 to help implement best practice credit and risk management techniques. The bank currently deploys Fair Isaac custom application scorecards and TRIAD™ adaptive control system to manage risk in its credit card portfolio.
About Strategy Science
A component of Fair Isaac's solutions for Enterprise Decision Management, Strategy Science combines a powerful methodology, process and platform, and models the economics of customer decisions. A powerful decision model maps the relationship between multiple input variables to the range of decision choices available to the user, and to the business consequences and drivers, such as losses and profitability. Fair Isaac's proprietary optimization software, Decision Optimizer, runs data through the model to find the optimal decisions under a stated set of business constraints. The result is a decision strategy that identifies the optimal action to take on each customer.
More than 50 financial institutions on five continents use Fair Isaac's Strategy Science technology to optimize business performance in acquisitions, origination, account management, customer retention and fraud referrals. To date, six of the top 10 North American credit card issuers and three of the top five UK banks have already achieved significant bottom-line results of up to 35 percent profit improvement through the use of Strategy Science.
About ICICI Bank
ICICI Bank (NYSE:IBN) is India's second largest bank and largest private sector bank with over 50 years of financial experience and with assets of USD 56 billion as on March 31, 2006. The Bank offers a wide range of banking products and financial services to corporate and retail customers through a variety of delivery channels and through its specialised subsidiaries and affiliates in the areas of investment banking, life and non-life insurance, venture capital and asset management. ICICI Bank is a leading player in the retail banking market and has over 17 million retail customer accounts. The Bank has a network of over 610 branches and extension counters, and 2200 ATMs.
ICICI Bank Limited set up its international banking group in fiscal 2002 to cater to the cross-border needs of clients and leverage on its domestic banking strengths to offer products internationally. ICICI Bank's international presence currently spans 12 countries and includes three wholly owned subsidiaries in the United Kingdom, Russia and Canada, offshore banking units in Singapore and Bahrain, advisory branch in DIFC, Dubai, branches in Sri Lanka and Hong Kong and representative offices in the United States, China, United Arab Emirates, Bangladesh and South Africa. The International operations of ICICI Bank diversify risks, accelerate growth and enhance profitability for the Bank. The Bank's strong retail network in India, technology enabled operations, superior servicing capabilities and corporate relationships in India provide it with a distinctive competitive advantage in each of the services it offers overseas.
About Fair Isaac
Fair Isaac Corporation (NYSE:FIC) makes decisions smarter. The company's solutions and technologies for Enterprise Decision Management give businesses the power to automate more processes and apply more intelligence to every customer interaction. Through increasing the precision, consistency and agility of their decisions, Fair Isaac clients worldwide increase sales, build customer value, cut fraud losses, manage credit risk, reduce operational costs, meet changing compliance demands and enter new markets more profitably. Founded in 1956, Fair Isaac powers hundreds of billions of decisions per year in financial services, insurance, telecommunications, retail, consumer branded goods, healthcare and the public sector. Fair Isaac also helps millions of individuals manage their credit health through the www.myFICO.com website.
Statement Concerning Forward-Looking Information
Except for historical information contained herein, the statements contained in this press release that relate to Fair Isaac, including statements regarding its Strategy Science and TRIAD™ product offerings and the benefits to be derived from these offerings, are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the "safe harbor" provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially, including any unforeseen technical difficulties related to the implementation, use and functionality of the offerings, the risks that customers will not perceive material benefits from the offerings, failure of the products to deliver the expected results, the possibility of errors or defects in the offerings, regulatory changes applicable to the use of consumer credit and other data, and other risks described from time to time in Fair Isaac's SEC reports, including its Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended September 30, 2005, and its quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the period ended March 31, 2006. Forward-looking statements should be considered with caution. If any of these risks or uncertainties materializes or any of these assumptions proves incorrect, Fair Isaac's results could differ materially from Fair Isaac's expectations in these statements. Fair Isaac disclaims any intent or obligation to update these forward-looking statements.
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