Big Data Changes the Analytics Paradigm

Big Data is a hot topic today that stems back to the early days of high-performance computing and parallel computing, which I worked on during my time in theoretical physics at Duke and Los Alamos. These days, Big Data tools facilitate the ease in applying these concepts. Interestingly, much of...

Managing Predictive Models (video)

Banks can increase the value they get from their predictive models by changing the way they manage those models. New OCC and Basel regulations make improving model management more important than ever. Hear more on this topic from Mike Gordon, FICO vice president and banking practice manager, in this Tech...

Inextricably Linked, for Better or for Worse

Last week, more than 30 senior risk officers from 12 countries across Asia Pacific gathered at the second annual FICO APAC Chief Risk Officer Forum in Bali, Indonesia. Hosted by FICO and moderated by IDC, the forum provided a venue for us to have an in-depth discussion around what’s ahead...

Credit Reports ≠ Credit Scores

More than ever, consumers are interested in their credit scores and credit reports. They ask questions when banking, paying bills online and shopping for a loan. This puts pressure on lenders to equip their employees with good answers to such questions. (myFICO.com is one source for those answers.) Unfortunately, this...

Celebrating fraud innovation

I'm proud to announce that FICO® Falcon® Fraud Manager 6 Analytics was named a finalist in the CONNECT Most Innovative New Product Awards, in the software category. This accolade was driven by the analytic innovations that I often blog about here, including: Adaptive Analytics, which are reducing account false positive...

Score differences across credit bureaus reflect true data differences

I recently had the pleasure of speaking at the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank’s Community Development Studies and Education Department’s conference “The Impact of Workout Options on Borrower’s Credit Reports and Scores.” The conference was well attended by regulators, lenders and consumer credit and housing counselors. FICO’s research on the score...

Webinar: Best Practices in Analytics and Model Validation

Next week, FICO will host free webinars that share best practices in analytics and model validation. With the proliferation of models used in financial services, and today's tightly regulated and volatile markets, organizations must reassess how well models are being strategically applied and how well they're being managed. In addition,...

Fighting Enterprise Fraud

Increasingly banks are looking to leverage the full breadth of data related to customers to make better decisions, and fraud is no exception. There is a strong desire to break down silos, so fraud/risk behaviors in one area of the customer’s interaction with the bank can be utilized in other...

New Analytics for Emerging Payments

Payment cards are changing. Whereas a plastic card used to access a single funding account, now we increasingly see cards—and very soon, mobile phones—that can access multiple funding accounts. This trend not only increases personalization options, but also fraud detection capabilities, if you leverage a cardholder’s history of what funding...

Learn more about modeling economic impact on credit risk

The FICO presentation on Economic Impact Grade Migration Modeling that won the Paragon Award for Best Paper at the Credit Scoring and Credit Control XII conference in Edinburgh last month has been posted online, along with the other conference papers, at: www.crc.man.ed.ac.uk/conference/archive/2011.html. I will be giving a webinar on this...

Changing payments means changing fraud detection

The traditional credit/debit card has become passé—at least in terms of having a single device with access to only one funding account. Today, a single card can, at the point of sale, access different accounts to fund the payment transaction. Likewise, a mobile device has the capability to make payments...

Closing the Gap on Fraud Model Degradation

Fraudsters are continually adjusting their strategies to circumvent fraud detection systems. In my last few posts, I've been discussing how adaptive analytics are built to counter this problem. Because of this, the latest version of FICO™ Falcon® Fraud Manager leverages adaptive analytics. The adaptive model adjusts the base neural network...

Edinburgh conference award for economic impact modeling

I’m proud to note that FICO’s Johan Jansen van Rensburg and I won the Best Paper Prize at the Credit Scoring and Credit Control XII conference in Edinburgh last week. Our paper was on “Economic Impact Grade Migration Modeling - To Address Pro-Cyclicality in Current Risk Management Practice,” and addresses...

Strengthening conventional fraud detection

Financial institutions are always looking for ways to combat newer fraud schemes—schemes that arise between fraud model developments and are not well-represented in the historical data. As I discussed in a recent post, one way to boost performance is to add analytics that are adaptive or self-learning. Deploying adaptive models...

How can fraud models combat new tricks?

The fight against payment card fraud resembles an arms race. Card issuers are deploying ever more sophisticated anti-fraud measures, and fraudsters are continually evolving strategies to evade those measures. Typically, issuers rely upon neural network fraud models trained on huge historical datasets to recognize recurring fraud patterns and reduce fraud...

Six does not equal one - improving access to credit in Singapore

Singapore, which is in the running to be the world's fastest-growing economy this year, is the nation with the most business-friendly regulations (and, where we at FICO headquarter our Asia Pacific operations). For the fifth year in a row, the World Bank and International Finance Corporation ranked Singapore as the...

100 patents that changed banking

FICO has just hit a major innovation milestone — we have now been granted 100 patents over the past 20 years. You can read the news release and watch a FICO Tech Talk, but I’d also like to point out the significance of these patents in financial services alone. These...

New ID Fraud Technique

The AP recently released an article that describes the latest technique criminals are using to slip in through the back door of the credit application process. This technique targets fresh or clean Social Security Numbers (SSN) that belong to children or people who have been in prison for most of...

Welcome to the FICO Banking Analytics blog — why are we here?

- Posted by Tom Quinn, FICO® Score Product Manager Today's bankers are information junkies. We should know - as the creators of the FICO® score and other predictive analytics solutions, we are constantly providing our clients with new research and insights into credit trends. We created this blog to share...