Grupo Monge Grows Credit Approvals 10% Using FICO Analytic Decisioning to Extend Loans to Underserved Consumers

MIAMI – May 11, 2021

Highlights:

• Grupo Monge has expanded credit approvals by 10 percent, reduced expenses by 25 percent.
• Grupo Monge scales lending with flexible, efficient and decentralized risk decision-making technologies.
• Grupo Monge won a 2021 FICO® Decisions Award for financial inclusion.

Grupo Monge, one of the largest multinational retail companies in Central America, has used analytic decisioning to improve the way it evaluates and grants credit to its customers, especially those previously excluded from being able to access loans. By implementing FICO® Blaze Advisor® decision rules management system, Grupo Monge has expanded credit approvals by 10 percent, reduced expenses by 25 percent and reduced the time taken to assess the credit application by 30 percent.

More information: https://www.fico.com/en/products/fico-blaze-advisor-decision-rules-management-system

Grupo Monge is a retail giant with more than 500 stores operating in Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Peru. The group has grown substantially by offering loans on consumer goods that can be paid off in affordable payments customized to customer conditions.

Prior to the implementation of FICO Blaze Advisor, credit analysis was made in person at Grupo Monge businesses in a process that customers found long and complex. While there was great demand from consumers to purchase substantial items on credit such as motorcycles, electronics and whitegoods, the company’s growth was being hamstrung by inflexible systems.

“We understood that for our business to scale we needed a way to improve our ability to assess customers and create a unique approach in the market,” said Jose Gonzalez, operations manager at Grupo Monge. “We had obviously outgrown the model where you had a manager making loan application decisions in-store. What was needed was to move to a flexible, efficient and decentralized approach.”

For many of the customers in the target segment for this project, buying consumer goods with cash was their only option. Grupo Monge knew they could change this and finance a large part of the population that needed credit to equip their homes.

To achieve this, Grupo Monge needed to assess each consumer’s risk accurately. FICO worked with Grupo Monge to develop scorecards that would help them automate the process as the volume of credit applications increased. Rather than just one predictive model, Grupo Monge and FICO saw the opportunity to produce country-specific models that captured regional risk patterns.

These models are activated within FICO® Blaze Advisor®, an advanced tool for decision strategy management. FICO Blaze Advisor is now the “central brain” for the credit decision process in all countries. Grupo Monge’s risk management teams can develop, author and test their own policies, which has accelerated implementation of strategy changes and improvements.

Beyond the automation of the origination process using scorecards and FICO Blaze Advisor, Grupo Monge is now using this “central brain” to make fraud, collections, and cross-sell decisions as well. Most recently Grupo Monge and FICO worked on a cross-sell project to detect incremental opportunities using the existing platform.

“By automating business rules and centralizing the analysis process, Grupo Monge has modernized its lending approach,” said Nikhil Behl chief marketing officer at FICO.  “People who previously could not afford big ticket items in cash are now afforded credit to improve their lives. This financial inclusion drive has yielded benefits for both Grupo Monge and its customers.”

For its achievements, Grupo Monge won a 2021 FICO® Decisions Award for financial inclusion.
“Grupo Monge has had a comprehensive and strategic approach to building credit opportunity across six countries,” said Prasanna Dhoré, Chief Data & Analytics and Innovation Officer at Equifax and one of the FICO Decisions Awards judges. “What they have managed to achieve in terms of financial inclusion is quite remarkable. They have coordinated the credit process across multiple areas of their company from sales to risk, customer service to finance.”

About Grupo Monge

Grupo Monge is a Costa Rican corporation that is dedicated to the retail sale of home appliances and furniture in Central and South America. It currently has stores in Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Peru.

Grupo Monge operates under the following five commercial brands

• El Gallo más Gallo
• Monge
• El Verdugo
• Prado
• Serpento

For more information, please visit www.grupomonge.com

About the FICO® Decisions Awards

The FICO Decisions 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 2021 judges are:

• Prasanna Dhoré, chief data & analytics and innovation officer, Equifax
• David Dittmann, vice president, data & analytics, P&G (2019 winner)
• René Javier Guzmán, market & liquidity risks director at Banreservas (2019 winner)
• Tomas Klinger, decision science and data director at Home Credit (2019 winner)
• Marcel Le Gouais, managing editor at Credit Strategy
• Tiffani Montez, banking analyst at Aite
• Lisa Morgan, journalist & analyst at InformationWeek
• Ignazio Provinzano, head of risk operations at Swisscard (2019 winner)

The winners of the FICO Decisions Awards will be spotlighted at and win tickets to FICO® World 2021, the Decisions Conference, November 2021 in Orlando, Florida.

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 195 US and foreign patents on technologies that increase profitability, customer satisfaction and growth for businesses in financial services, manufacturing, telecommunications, health care, retail and many other industries. Using FICO solutions, businesses in more than 120 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 www.fico.com.

FICO and Blaze Advisor are registered trademarks of Fair Isaac Corporation in the US and other countries.                                               

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