FICO Debuts Solution Stack to Accelerate Big Data Analytics Adoption and Innovation

Groundbreaking data visualization, decision management and analytics bridge the gap between Big Data, analysis and decision execution

Singapore – May 7, 2014 – FICO (NYSE: FICO), a leading predictive analytics and decision management software company, today announced the general availability of the FICO® Solution Stack, a collection of software products that includes the FICO® Decision Management Platform and three new analytic and decision studios. The FICO Solution Stack is available in the cloud and as on-premises software. With 30 patents at its core, the FICO Solution Stack brings together Big Data, predictive analytics and decision execution into an easy-to-use development environment. It enables organizations to create innovative analytic applications rapidly; dramatically increase developer and business user productivity with support for a broad range of analytic and decision tools; and execute decisions in real time.

“The FICO Solution Stack is a critical part of our strategy to help businesses simplify the development, the deployment and the management of Big Data analytics powered applications and solutions,” said Stuart Wells, chief technology officer and executive vice president of product development at FICO. “Organizations of any size can now use the FICO Solution Stack to extract value from Big Data, make better decisions, solve previously unsolvable problems and engage with their customers in more meaningful and successful ways. We are in the midst of an analytic revolution that is changing the world, and now every business can compete using FICO analytic technology.”

“Cloud-based platforms hold the potential to make analytics accessible to a wider set of users by reducing many of the bottlenecks associated with acquiring, deploying and maintaining complex software,” said Brian McDonough, research manager for Business Analytics Solutions at IDC. “As cloud-based analytic adoption continues to grow, more organizations will be able to improve their analytics capabilities and guide their business processes towards optimal outcomes.”

The FICO Solution Stack’s new analytic and decision studios provide tools for building, extending, deploying and scaling applications and solutions. FICO® Decision Studio enables users to build and customize analytic and decision components and services, powered by analytics from any source including broad support for PMML. FICO® Application Studio enables users to rapidly develop, orchestrate, and publish analyticspowered applications. FICO® Visual Insights Studio gives users powerful tools for visualizing, analyzing and reporting data trends. The studios run on and leverage the FICO Decision Management Platform, a full-featured, open standards-based platform that delivers comprehensive decision management with lifecycle management, simple integration and interoperability.

The FICO® Solution Stack was designed to support data transportability and open modeling best practices.

FICO Technology Helps Brunei Finance Company BIBD At-Tamwil Berhad Boost Car Loan Revenue by 20 Percent

Brunei-based auto finance company uses FICO Blaze Advisor and iPad tablets to enable car dealers to approve loans on the spot

SINGAPORE — April 30, 2014 — FICO (NYSE:FICO), a leading predictive analytics and decision management software company, today announced that BIBD At-Tamwil Berhad, a subsidiary of Bank Islam Brunei Darussalam (BIBD), has seen an increase of 20 percent or more in auto loan bookings since it implemented a mobile decision management application developed using FICO technology.

The company’s ability to provide on-the-spot decisions for loans has been the driving factor in boosting business. Its marketing agents at car dealers now use iPads to process credit applications at the car lot, entering the customer’s financial information into the mobile app, along with photographs of important documents such as identity cards and payslips. This information, along with credit bureau data, is then analyzed using predictive analytics and business rules within FICO® Blaze Advisor® decision rules system to provide a loan approval decision. This customer-centric approach has streamlined the experience, increasing buyer satisfaction and therefore sales.

“We felt customers were waiting too long for loan approvals using our old system,” said Irwan Lamit, managing director of BIBD At-Tamwil Berhad, which helps more than 14,000 Brunei consumers every year to finance new and used cars or motorbikes. “With this new approach, we’ve cut the process from a potential 24 hours down to mere minutes while still effectively managing risks. This is a win-win solution that has grown our client base and sales.”

BIBD At-Tamwil Berhad, a subsidiary of the largest Islamic Bank in Brunei, made this technology investment as part of its strategy to double its revenue every five years in a highly competitive and saturated marketplace.

“Finding growth meant targeting new customers while managing our risk,” said Irwan. “We decided to include non-salary assigned customers, people whose principal bank account is not with our parent bank. To do this, while increasing loan turnaround time, meant quality risk management was an essential ingredient to the solution.”

FICO predictive analytics and FICO Blaze Advisor enabled BIBD At-Tamwil Berhad to manage its loan portfolio risk, satisfy regulatory requirements and take full advantage of information from the newly formed credit bureau, which became available in late 2012.

“The system delivered other positives too,” added Irwan. “The technology is so intuitive,staff are up and running in minutes, and are guided to capture all information needed for regulatory requirements.”

Dinesh Pereira, who manages FICO’s business in Brunei, added that the innovative solution developed for BIBD At-Tamwil Berhad is a great example of the use of customer-focused technology in the financial services industry to drive profits.

“The automation of decision processes minimizes the need for manual reviews, while ensuring consistency,” said Pereira. “Packaging this for delivery on an iPad using the Blaze Advisor system delivers a unique combination of convenience and the industry’s highest decision processing speeds, for any number of rules at any level of complexity.

“BIBD At-Tamwil Berhad is using technology to make life easier for clients looking to buy automobiles. Their work demonstrates what is possible when the power of analytics and mobile are brought together to improve the customer experience.”

FICO Launches Powerful Identity Resolution Engine That Helps Thwart Fraud Rings

50+ algorithms scour multiple data sources to help defeat criminal rings that perpetrate money laundering, insider fraud and other crimes

Singapore — April 7, 2014 — FICO (NYSE:FICO), a leading predictive analytics and decision management software company, today announced the general availability of FICO® Identity Resolution Engine 3.6, a powerful software solution that improves personal identification to detect criminal fraud rings and other forms of crime. The new version combines entity resolution with social network analytics to help banks, insurance companies and government agencies uncover criminal rings, expose money laundering schemes, detect insider fraud, enhance screening processes, uncover terrorist networks and investigate crime.

FICO Identity Resolution Engine 3.6 builds on technology FICO acquired when it purchased Infoglide in April 2013. This advanced identity resolution and social network analysis software enables users to understand the relationships between their organization, customers, events, and third-party actors. FICO Identity Resolution Engine helps stop organized criminal rings by exposing links between one suspicious person or activity and others that have gone undetected.
With FICO Identity Resolution Engine, organizations can perform real-time searches across their enterprise’s disparate data to find, match, and link similar entities and uncover hidden relationship between people, places and things. More than 50 proprietary identity resolution algorithms provide superior match rates. Thanks to a library of prebuilt network analytics, businesses of all sizes can get started faster.

“This technology has obvious value in areas like insurance claims and banking fraud, where a pattern that crosses multiple claims can help you uncover abuse or expose fraud rings,” said TJ Horan, who oversees FICO’s fraud management solutions. “FICO clients use this technology to detect identity theft, manage healthcare waste and abuse and stop fraud at the source. But it’s also valuable in a host of other applications where it’s critical to be able to quickly spot a pattern that indicates organized criminal activity.”

FICO Identity Resolution Engine is a popular software add-on to the FICO® Falcon® Fraud Platformand is used extensively with other fraud applications from FICO, such as FICO® Application Fraud Manager and FICO® Insurance Fraud Manager, to improve fraud investigations and detection.

FICO Identity Resolution Engine is also fully integrated with FICO® Blaze Advisor® businessrules management system, enabling businesses to implement custom rules or execute sophisticated models based on social network analysis quickly. Federated data search capabilities allow users to search internal and/or external third-party data sources without needing to build a data warehouse, migrate data to a common repository or cleanse and normalize data. The software has a new, flexible user interface that can be customized to meet specific needs.

FICO Infographic: How Fast is Real-Time Fraud Detection?

FICO fraud analytics help stop criminals by performing 15,000 calculations in 40-60 milliseconds during credit card transactions; calculations are completed 5X faster than you can blink

Singapore — April 4, 2014 — FICO (NYSE:FICO), a leading predictive analytics and decision management software company, today released an infographic illustrating the speed at which Big Data analytic software operates. In the example of credit card payments, analytic software is able to recognize potentially fraudulent transactions within 40-60 milliseconds — five times faster than you can blink.

FICO® Falcon® Fraud Manager performs more than 15,000 calculations to detect fraud in less time than it takes a helicopter blade to rotate or an automobile airbag to inflate. These real-time fraud calculations use a wealth of data associated with many variables, including the transaction amount, merchant profile, transaction location, point-of-sale device, time of day, and credit card account history.

“Stopping payment fraud is a balancing act that requires payment card providers to protect their cardholders without inconveniencing them,” said Dr. Andrew Jennings, chief analytics officer at FICO and head of FICO Labs. “By combining the power of new analytic technologies and the accumulated knowledge gleaned from trillions of previous payment transactions, it is now possible to fight fraud with surgical precision at incredible speeds, so the consumer payment experience is not disrupted.”

FICO’s real-time, fraud-prevention infographic can be viewed and downloaded at www.fico.com/realtime.

Next Generation of Industry-Leading FICO Customer Management Solution Accelerates Deployment of Analytics

New features in TRIAD 9 Customer Manager help clients more easily and profitably manage customer and account relationships with advanced analytics

SINGAPORE, September 18, 2013 —FICO (NYSE:FICO), a leading predictive analytics and decision management software company, today announced the general availability of FICO® TRIAD® Customer Manager 9, the newest version of the industry’s leading customer management solution. TRIAD Customer Manager forecasts customer behavior and rapidly turns those insights into successful strategies for generating and automating profitable decisions. The new version is designed to help clients deploy advanced analytics much faster, from weeks to hours, and gain new insights into strategy performance.

TRIAD 9 includes a completely new web-based user interface designed with extensive input from TRIAD clients. TRIAD 9 also includes tighter integration with FICO® Model Builder, a powerful analytics tool, and direct access to FICO® Blaze Advisor®, a leading business rules management system. Clients will be able to rapidly discover and deploy highly predictive analytics models in Model Builder, using data stored in the TRIAD Analytic Datamart, and deploy them immediately through a new closed-loop process, greatly enhancing time-to-value of model development by up to 75 percent, and without the need to involve IT.

The leading solution in financial services customer management since 1986, TRIAD Customer Manager is used to manage 65 percent of the world’s credit card accounts and multiple product portfolios for many of the world’s leading banks. TRIAD gives financial services providers, including more than half of the world’s top 100 banks, a way to manage multi-product relationships at the customer level.

“TRIAD 9 makes the development and deployment of analytic decision strategies easier and faster than ever before,” said David Lightfoot, FICO vice president of product management.

“Clients now have access to a highly powerful and flexible solution that can be configured to meet the needs for enterprise-wide, multi-line or portfolio-level management, enabling them to surpass the remarkable results they’ve already achieved with the solution. This is the most significant upgrade of the TRIAD platform in a decade.”

“Customer loyalty depends on relevant offers and communications, which in turn demands advanced customer analytics,” said CEB TowerGroup research director Craig Focardi.

“Organizations are looking to harness advanced analytics to improve staff efficiency and consumer interaction, allowing organizations to not only have accurate information for internal uses, but also provide a better experience to the consumer. Flexibility and speed are the name of the game.”

FICO® TRIAD® Customer Manager delivers advanced analytics, unmatched strategy consulting, and sophisticated strategy design tools. Customer-centric companies throughout the financial services, telecommunications and retail industries rely on TRIAD Customer Manager to make the right customer decision at the right time. Version 9 is designed for an easy migration for current users of FICO TRIAD version 8.3 and higher.

New FICO Software Enables Data Scientists to Transform Big Data into Predictive Mo

FICO Model Builder for Big Data integrates with Hadoop, Lucene and R to enable better decisions from massive and unstructured data sets

SINGAPORE — August 29, 2013 — FICO (NYSE:FICO), a leading predictive analytics and decision management software company, today introduced FICO® Model Builder for Big Data, the latest release of its powerful analytics tool. Model Builder for Big Data enables data scientists to rapidly discover, design and deploy predictive analytics models that find signals in unstructured and massive data sets and turn those signals into actionable insights.

Model Builder for Big Data brings proven machine learning and statistical data mining to Big Data for the first time, enabling analysts to find the predictive signals hidden in huge and challenging data sources. Its state-of-the-art text mining capabilities, unique Semantic Scorecard formulation, and embedded Lucene and Tika indexing and extraction libraries, provide powerful mining of text from a wide variety of document types, and boost the predictive strength of its transparent, easily understood scoring formulas. Model Builder for Big Data also integrates Apache Hadoop, the open-source framework for scalable, reliable, distributed computing and storage, and works with Cloudera’s proven, enterprise-ready Hadoop distribution. Along with new support for the popular R language for statistical computing and graphics, Model Builder brings a breadth and depth of functionality for Big Data that is both scalable and cost-effective.

“Modeling massive data sets can be challenging, because most traditional data analysis tools have been built for the ‘small data’ world, with highly structured, mostly numerical data,” said Stuart Wells, chief technology officer at FICO. “Today, data volumes are orders of magnitude larger, they defy a simple ‘rows and columns’ structure, and they’re mostly made up of messy, unstructured information like text, voice and even video. We have built Model Builder for Big Data to cope with this kind of unwieldy raw information, and make it into something meaningful and valuable.”

“Enterprise developers are increasingly managing massive amounts of data, content and information,” said James Taylor, CEO and principal consultant at Decision Management Solutions. “Existing technologies and techniques for predictive analytics are unlocking secrets previously hidden in enterprises' structured data, but there is an even larger opportunity if unstructured content can be tapped for additional decision-making insight."

FICO® Model Builder for Big Data is part of the FICO® Decision Management Platform, and is available on-premise and is expected to be available via the FICO® Analytic Cloud.

New Infographic from FICO Labs Shows How “Big Bang” of Analytics Is Changing Modern Life

Advances in predictive analytics and rise of Big Data are changing how businesses, governments and individuals make decisions

SINGAPORE – June 21, 2013 – FICO (NYSE: FICO), a leading predictive analytics and decision management software company, today published an analytics infographic from FICO Labs that shows how a “big bang” effect in predictive analytics is changing modern life. The infographic illustrates how innovations over the past 70+ years have led to a new era that will revolutionize research and development, touch every type of business, fundamentally change the way individuals make personal decisions, and enable governments to reinvent the way they operate.

“The Analytics Big Bang” traces predictive analytics from the dawn of the computer age in the 1940s through the present day, and cites compelling evidence indicating that the analytics industry is at an inflection point:

 Sales of analytics software grew from $11 billion to $35 billion between 2000 and 2012.

 The number of data scientist job posts jumped 15,000% from 2011 to 2012, according to statistics compiled by global job site Indeed.com.

 2.5 quintillion bytes of so-called Big Data are being created each day, enabling analytics to become more insightful, precise and predictive than at any point in history.

“Predictive analytics is becoming the defining technology of the early 21st century,” said Dr. Andrew Jennings, FICO’s chief analytics officer and head of FICO Labs. “You can trace the evolution over the past few decades, but we’ve now reached a tipping point where the convergence of Big Data, cloud computing and analytic technology is leading to massive innovation and market disruption. We foresee predictive analytics being used to solve previously unsolvable problems, and bringing enormous value to businesses, governments and people.”

“Predictive analytics has clearly become one of the make-or-break capabilities for consumer-facing businesses,” said Dan Vesset, program vice president of business analytics research at independent analyst firm IDC. “By combining individual-level behavior forecasts with optimization analytics that determine the right action for each context, organizations can create the kind of relevant, positive experience that builds revenue and customer loyalty. As these technologies move to the cloud, every business can learn to compete on analytics.”

FICO Introduces Analytic Cloud to Accelerate Big Data Innovation and Value Worldwide

Groundbreaking analytics and decision management platform will remove the barriers to creating, customizing and deploying analytic-driven services

FICO™ World, MIAMI – May 8, 2013 — FICO (NYSE:FICO), a leading predictive analytics and decision management software company, today unveiled the FICO® Analytic Cloud, for creating, customizing and deploying powerful analytic-driven applications and services. The FICO Analytic Cloud will spur Big Data innovation by giving application developers, business users and FICO partners around the world one-stop access to FICO’s best-in-class analytics and decision management tools and technology, including SaaS (software as a service) applications for social and mobile customer engagement, targeted marketing campaigns and offers, delinquent account management and instant credit decisioning. The FICO Analytic Cloud will include an analytics and decision management community for sharing and collaborating.

The FICO Analytic Cloud will provide platform-as-a-service access to the new FICO® Decision Management Platform, which includes FICO’s award-winning and market-leading software for business rules management, predictive analytics, data and text mining, optimization, visualization and reporting. Delivered in the cloud or on-premise, the FICO Decision Management Platform helps close the gap between data and decision making by enabling organizations to create powerful decision services that analyze customer behavior, target decisions to individuals and determine the best possible action in real-time. Regardless of industry, business size or location, the FICO Decision Management Platform will make it easier, faster and cheaper to execute business decisions based on customer insight and rapidly changing market and business conditions.

FICO will also deliver SaaS applications in the FICO Analytic Cloud which will enable businesses to manage social and mobile customer interactions through the FICO® Adeptra® Mobile Services platform, target campaigns through FICO® Customer Dialogue Manager, extend highly personalized and relevant offers through FICO® Analytic Offer Manager, place and manage delinquent accounts through the FICO® PlacementPlus® service, and make instant credit decisions through the FICO® LiquidCredit® service. Throughout 2013, FICO plans to make even more of its best-in-class applications available as a service in the FICO Analytic Cloud, in addition to providing access to relevant third-party analytic services through an analytic marketplace.

“With the FICO Analytic Cloud, we’re removing the barriers for gaining quick time to value from Big Data,” said Stuart Wells, chief technology officer at FICO, who unveiled the FICO Analytic Cloud in his keynote address at FICO™ World 2013 in Miami. “Now, our customers, partners and developers have a single place where they can rapidly consume, contribute and collaborate on innovations large and small. We believe this collection of innovations will change the world, sparking a renaissance of new solutions to problems that were previously thought to be unsolvable.”

“The need for cloud services is being accelerated by new mobile devices, wireless networks, Big Data analytics and social networking, and the services are evolving into the industry's third major platform for long-term growth,” said Al Hilwa, program director, Application Development Software at IDC. "This third platform promises to radically expand the users and uses of information technology, leading to a wide range of intelligent industry solutions, and to greater demand for powerful analytic and decision management services in the cloud.”

Built on open-source technologies and leveraging the latest industry standards, the FICO® Analytic Cloud is designed to support data transportability and open modeling best practices. FICO will be rolling out components of the FICO Analytic Cloud throughout 2013. The FICO Analytic Cloud will be available at http://www.ficoanalyticcloud.com.

BOCOM is First Bank in China to Fight Fraud Using Leading FICO Analytic Solution

China’s fifth-largest bank leads drive to improve fraud detection rates and protect customers from emerging fraud schemes. 

Singapore — January 29, 2013 — FICO (NYSE:FICO), the leading provider of analytics and decision management technology, today announced that China’s Bank of Communications (BOCOM) has selected FICO® Falcon® Fraud Manager to protect the bank and its customers from payment card fraud. BOCOM, one of four oldest banks in China, will be the first Chinese bank to implement FICO’s industry-leading fraud solution, which is used by more than 9,000 financial services organizations worldwide to protect more than 2.5 billion active card accounts, including more than 50 million in the Asia-Pacific region.

China’s Bank of Communications, with HSBC, established the China Bank of Communications Pacific Credit Card Center in 2004. Like most Chinese banks, the bank was using a combination of third-party and in-house systems to manage and track fraud, but its systems lacked real-time detection capabilities and could not recognize new types of fraud. After a competitive review, BOCOM chose FICO’s solution on the strength of its global track record.

“Our goal is to protect our customers ‘card security while ensuring that they have a good experience at the point of transaction,” said Dr. Liu Xuanqing, director of the risk department, Pacific Credit Card Center. “With FICO’s solution, we are confident we can considerably reduce losses in transaction fraud and also generate fewer false positives, resulting in a more protected environment for our customers.”

This marks the second time BOCOM has been first-to-market with a FICO application, as the bank previously has implemented FICO® TRIAD® Customer Manager, FICO® Model Builder, FICO® Capstone® Decision Accelerator, in addition to other FICO decision management applications.  

“China’s consumer banking industry has experienced explosive growth, but with that growth comes criminals seeking to perpetrate fraud,” said John Chen, managing director for FICO in China. “By selecting FICO Falcon Fraud Manager, BOCOM has raised the standard for performance for the entire industry, with real-time detection of both known fraud schemes and those that are likely to emerge in the future.”

FICO® Falcon® Fraud Manager has been proven to reduce fraud losses as much as 50%, saving US card issuers more than $10 billion over the last 20 years, and Asia-Pacific issuers more than $1.7 billion. The solution uses neural network models, patented cardholder profiles and business rules to detect fraud.