Pandemic Challenges Drive EMEA Banks to FICO AI-Powered Optimisation

LONDON, 10 February 2022 – As businesses across Europe, the Middle East and Africa look for efficiency gains and ways to increase revenues during the pandemic, many are turning to prescriptive analytics and mathematical optimisation — the analytical science used to improve everything from Amazon’s supply chains to airline scheduling. Global analytics software leader FICO is reporting increasing demand for its AI-powered optimisation tools and solutions, especially in the financial services sector.

More information: https://www.fico.com/en/solutions/optimization-financial-services

Akbank, one of Turkey’s largest banks, uses FICO optimisation for credit line increase decisions and to optimize loan approvals, selecting the right amount and rate to improve profitability and offer take-up. Akbank will also work with FICO to build a centre of excellence for decision optimisation.

“With FICO optimisation, we can adjust initial credit limits to each customer’s risk and reward levels, and manage them as the bank’s strategy changes,” said Serhan Pak, senior vice president, Retail Lending, Akbank. “The proof of value study we conducted clearly showed that we could make significant gains using this approach and FICO’s industry-leading technology.” Akbank has won a FICO Decisions Award for its use of optimisation.

Bank Leumi, the leading bank in Israel and presence in UK and USA, will use FICO's optimisation tools for its loans' portfolio.

“We did an extensive review of both global and local optimisation suppliers,” said Pini Schatz, head of Technology and Future Banking Retail Division at Bank Leumi. “We concluded that FICO had the most experience helping businesses get the most value from using optimisation, and FICO’s tools were top of the market. We can use this technology across multiple areas of the bank.”

FICO also recently announced new optimization deals with Ultimo SA in Poland and Slovenská Sporiteľňa in Slovakia.

“We are seeing a real explosion in demand for decision optimisation and prescriptive analytics,” added Matt Cox, EMEA general manager for FICO. “It brings scientific precision to the art of developing decision strategies, and in difficult times like today that’s more necessary than ever. Banks are looking for an edge, and FICO optimisation gives it to them. That’s why many of our customers are extending its use to new products and new decision areas, after their initial success in one area.”

FICO’s advanced decision impact modelling, simulation and optimization techniques allow lenders to discover better decision strategies that balance trade-offs between cost, risk and reward, while also factoring in economic and market conditions. It is increasingly widely used in areas such as loan pricing, alternative deal structures for auto lending, deposit pricing, credit line management and collections.

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, 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 https://www.fico.com

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

For further comment contact:
FICO UK PR Team
Wendy Harrison/Parm Heer/Matthew Enderby
ficoteam@harrisonsadler.com
0208 977 9132