FICO Named Category Leader for Cyber Risk Quantification in Chartis Report

SAN JOSE, Calif. — June 12, 2019

Highlights:

• Chartis named FICO a category leader in cyber risk quantification in its new industry report.
• Ranking reflects depth of functionality, geographic coverage and strategy.
• The FICO® Cyber Risk Score measures the likelihood of a business suffering a material data breach in the next 12 months.

FICO, a leading analytics software company, today announced that it has been named a category leader in cyber risk quantification solutions in the Cyber Risk Quantification Solutions, 2019: Market and Vendor Landscape report from research firm Chartis.

For more information: https://www.fico.com/en/chartis-names-fico-category-leader-cyber-risk-quantification-solutions

“As the frequency and severity of cyber breaches continue to grow, cyber crime is now one of the biggest challenges facing financial institutions (FIs),” the report notes. “FIs and vendors have sought to quantify cyber risk before, but increasingly they are spending such large sums on cybersecurity systems that they require defensible risk scores for their cyber domains. And only now is there technology available to automate analysis and leverage the vast datasets required to properly quantify cyber risk. Demand for cyber risk quantification (CRQ) solutions is coming from insurers – keen to assess the risk in counterparties’ infrastructure – and more general financial services firms, which want to assess the risk in the systems they rely on for their operations.”

A companion report, Vendor Analysis: FICO; Cyber Risk Quantification Solutions, 2019, gives more detailed analysis of FICO’s rating in the industry report*.

“Given FICO’s heritage in risk quantification and ML [machine learning], the underpinnings of the FICO Cyber Risk Score leverage a rich set of IP in feature engineering, designed to expose and amplify signals used to quantify forward-looking risk outcomes,” the Vendor Analysis states. It cites three notable features of the FICO® Cyber Risk Score:

• Empirically derived. “The FICO Cyber Risk Score is built using a supervised analytic model. This score leverages mathematical relationships between signal data, inferred behaviors, and real-world security outcomes from both breached and non-breached organizations.”
• Focused on risk quantification. This is a better approach than just inventories of vulnerability. “While vulnerability inventories are important, they can also serve to mask underlying risk. As a result, organizations may confuse security activity (e.g., patching cadence) with effectiveness, and distract security teams from focusing on impactful change.”
• Depth and breadth of signals. “The key risk signals leveraged by the FICO Cyber Risk Score are based on a deep database of timeseries historical information, collected by FICO, which spans the entire internet address space for six years. This allows FICO to correlate conditions and behaviors to cyber incidents, regardless of delays in disclosure, and enables it to immediately generate scores for companies worldwide.”

As the report notes, the FICO® Cyber Risk Score, like the FICO® Score for credit, is a predictive tool rather than a report card: “Rather than grading the current state of the network, FICO evaluates forward-looking risk by employing a ML model that is trained to a well-defined objective outcome – the likelihood of a material data breach event in the next 12 months. This provides an easy to interpret result that applies across self-assessment, third-party risk management, and cyber insurance underwriting.”

“This report shows the growing importance of cyber risk quantification, and FICO’s leadership in this field," said Doug Clare, vice president of cybersecurity solutions at FICO. “We feel strongly that now is the right time to bring quantitative risk management disciplines to the field of cyber security. FICO have  spent years researching the analytic methods that power the FICO Cyber Risk Score, making it an unbeatable solution for quantifying cyber risk.”

Organizations can get a free subscription to their FICO® Cyber Risk Score at cyberscore.fico.com.  Subscriptions for third-party risk management, including scores on third- and fourth-party vendors and supply chain partners, are also available.  

About FICO
FICO (NYSE: FICO) powers decisions that help people and businesses around the world prosper. Founded in 1956 and based in Silicon Valley, the company is a pioneer in the use of predictive analytics and data science to improve operational decisions. FICO holds more than 190 US and foreign patents on technologies that increase profitability, customer satisfaction and growth for businesses in financial services, telecommunications, health care, retail and many other industries. Using FICO solutions, businesses in more than 100 countries do everything from protecting 2.6 billion payment cards from fraud, to helping people get credit, to ensuring that millions of airplanes and rental cars are in the right place at the right time. Learn more at http://www.fico.com

FICO is a registered trademark of Fair Isaac Corporation in the U.S. and other countries.

About Chartis Research
Chartis Research is the leading provider of research and analysis on the global market for risk technology. It is part of Infopro Digital, which owns market-leading brands such as Risk and WatersTechnology. Chartis’ goal is to support enterprises as they drive business performance through improved risk management, corporate governance and compliance, and to help clients make informed technology and business decisions by providing in-depth analysis and actionable advice on virtually all aspects of risk technology.

RiskTech100®, RiskTech Quadrant®, FinTech Quadrant™ and The Risk Enabled Enterprise® are Registered Trade Marks of Infopro Digital Services Limited.

www.chartis-research.com

*Note that the quadrant image and these statements were published by Chartis Research as part of larger research documents (‘Cyber Risk Quantification Solutions, 2019: Market and Vendor Landscape’ and ‘Vendor Analysis: FICO; Cyber Risk Quantification Solutions, 2019’) and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document(s). Chartis evaluates all vendors using consistent and objective criteria, and does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, nor does it advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Chartis Research’s publications consist of the opinions of its research analysts and should not be construed as statements of fact.

Contact:
Greg Jawski for FICO
Email: greg.jawski@porternovelli.com
Phone: +1 212-601-8248