Fico (NYSE: FICO), the leading provider of analytics and decision management technology, today announced that one of South Africa's leading banks, Absa, has selected the Fico Blaze Advisor business rules management system as its decision engine for all consumer credit originations.
A member of the Barclays Group, Absa will use the award-winning FICO solution to standardize its decision process across all its lines of business, including mortgage, personal and auto loans, cheques and credit cards, leading to significantly greater agility and effectiveness.
Like many banks, Absa previously used different policies and rules for its different credit products. FICO Blaze Advisor gives Absa a single point of control to manage multiple product offers and make customer-level decisions. By implementing a common set of rules, the bank stands to improve its response time and decision consistency, adjusting its origination practices quickly in response to market changes.
FICO Blaze Advisor enables Absa business users to modify business rules themselves, without having to rely on technical staff support. Business users therefore have greater flexibility and control over policies and can act much more swiftly to changing market dynamics, reducing the time required to modify rules from days or weeks to hours or even minutes.
A key factor in Absa's decision to implement FICO Blaze Advisor was its new and unique Decision Simulator module, which enables users to run simulations and evaluate the business impact of automated decisions before deploying them. This is especially critical today, as lenders must ensure that changes to lending criteria and specific terms will not create risk exposure problems.
"In the current environment, we're actively looking for ways to improve our response time to shifting market conditions," said Jaco Rossouw, Head, Capability Development and Change for Retail Credit Risk at Absa. "FICO Blaze Advisor proved to be the one system we could deploy across our entire retail credit product portfolio to achieve this, helping us make faster, more precise and more consistent decisions to propel our business forward."
FICO Blaze Advisor is the foundation of the integrated FICO Decision Management Suite, which enables applications to share common customer information for better decisions at all phases of the credit lifecycle. Absa had already been using the FICO® TRIAD® customer management solution and the FICO® Debt ManagerTM system for collections and recovery. With the addition of FICO Blaze Advisor for originations, the bank has taken a major step in executing a connected decisions strategy and managing credit risk across the credit lifecycle.
"By selecting FICO Blaze Advisor as its originations decision engine, Absa has validated the merits of a well-executed connected decisions strategy, while reaffirming its own leadership position in the industry," said David Lightfoot, vice president for product management at FICO.