FICO CEO on CNBC Squawk Box: Credit Where It’s Due

On CNBC Squawk Box, FICO CEO Mark Greene discusses results from a new FICO survey of risk managers, as well as key issues affecting US consumer credit health. For those who can't see the embedded video above, view it here.

Defining what makes a “good” model

Central to developing and evaluating an analytic model is the definition of what constitutes a “good model.” At FICO, we view it as the dimensions of good. Let’s take fraud models as an example. What makes one model look high-performing may be misleading if that performance degrades quickly. A model...

Finally … Optimism Among U.S. Bankers

Each quarter we survey a couple hundred bank risk officers about their expectations for consumer (and small business) credit. As you might expect, there was a lot of pessimism throughout 2010. But in our Q1 2011 survey, we found a big change … bankers are becoming optimistic! Most notably, respondents...

Leveraging the deposit relationship

This is a period of cautious growth for banks, and there’s no safer way to extend more credit than to start with your good customers. That’s why we see banks focusing more and more on the customer experience and taking decisions at the customer level. That means leveraging the deposit...

Research looks at how mortgage delinquencies affect scores

How much impact does a short sale have on FICO® Scores? How about a foreclosure? Since I frequently hear these questions from clients and others, I thought I’d share new FICO research that sheds light on this very subject. The FICO study simulated various types of mortgage delinquencies on three...

Post-crisis risk management

The advent of the economic crisis caused some core beliefs in traditional risk management to be tested. We had our very own stress test, not just of the portfolio but also of the tools used to manage that portfolio. As our models came under stress, regulators changed the rules that...

Connecting decisions at originations

In a recent post, I made the case for why lenders must be able to consistently make profitable originations decisions in diverse and changing credit markets. As a result, it’s critical that origination solutions allow lenders to bring a wider range of analytics to bear on credit applications for sharper...

Collect with Kindness

There’s an old saying, 'Kill them with kindness.' A modern version might read, 'Collect with kindness.' As Janice Horan and I discussed at recent FICO Forum events in Europe, those in debt experience profound humiliation and react badly to brute-force collection techniques. The cumulative effect of all collection efforts reinforces...

Cross-channel fraud – a problem for Asia Pacific, too

Fraud is a hot topic on this blog. I was particularly intrigued by what my colleague Mike Urban had to say on the emerging threat of cross-channel fraud. In our work with banks in Singapore and around Asia Pacific, we see that bank fraud continues to escalate, posing a costly...

First-Party Fraud - the Hidden Part of the Iceberg

Banks have been dealing successfully with third-party fraud for decades — today’s report on the low rates of card fraud in the UK bears this out — but there is another side to fraud: first-party fraud. First-party fraud represents the hidden part of the iceberg, and it can sink your...

Analytic Imperatives for a Post-Crisis World

How have analytic priorities changed as a result of the economic crisis? In this Tech Talk, FICO Chief Analytics Officer Andrew Jennings lays out new directions for analytics. He discusses the concepts of modeling decisions and predicting the impact of economic changes, and stresses the importance of the analyst/modeler, saying...

Basel III and Profitability

The new Basel III rules on capital and liquidity are focusing banks on how to achieve compliance with new ratios. But as McKinsey points out in a recent white paper, banks also need to start developing strategies and initiatives to enable them to make market-acceptable returns from their products and...

Withdrawing tax liens unwise

You’ve probably heard that the IRS will now make it easier for delinquent taxpayers to have tax lien records completely removed from credit bureau files. The taxpayers need to pay their overdue tax bill in full or simply agree to a direct-deposit arrangement for paying the overdue tax. So instead...

Phishers Cast Their Nets Across the Social Networks

Fraudsters looking to harvest personal information to support their methodical attacks on online bank accounts have begun turning their attentions to the proliferation of data unwittingly or naively provided “in the clear” on social network profiles. People are listing their names, addresses, dates of birth, family, residence, work and even...