Pandemic drives banks to FICO AI

As businesses across Europe, the Middle East and Africa continue to look for efficiency gains and ways to increase revenues during the pandemic, many are turning to prescriptive analytics and mathematical optimization – the analytical science used to improve everything from Amazon’s supply chains to airline scheduling.  

As a result, FICO (www.fico.com) reports an increasing demand for its AI-powered optimization tools and solutions, especially in the financial services sector (www.fico.com/en/solutions/optimization-financial-services)

Akbank, one of Turkey’s largest banks, and Bank Leumi, the leading bank in Israel are latest lenders to build lending strategies with advanced prescriptive analytics from FICO.

“With FICO optimization, we can adjust initial credit limits to each customer’s risk and reward levels, and manage them as the bank’s strategy changes,” comments 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 recently won a FICO Decisions Award for its use of optimization.

“We did an extensive review of both global and local optimisation suppliers,” says Pini Schatz, head of Technology and Future Banking Retail Division, Bank Leumi.  “We concluded that FICO had the most experience helping businesses get the most value from optimization, 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,” adds Matt Cox, EMEA general manager, 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 optimization 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.