NEW YORK -

Along with three other separate solution launches, FICO also highlighted during its largest annual event this week a jointly developed data decisions cloud suite that’s been completed with the team at Equifax, a member of the Automotive Intelligence Council.

The full suite demonstrated at FICO World 2019 included the cloud-based Data Decisions Connected Platform and two solutions that combine Equifax differentiated data and analytics management with FICO digital decisioning capabilities. The companies explained these offerings are designed to help organizations harness the power of their data and analytics investments across the value chain to help assess risk, protect against fraud, improve marketing capabilities and better serve their customers at the pace of digital innovation.

A finance company that operates in the subprime space and takes on plenty of risk described what this solution from FICO and Equifax already accomplished for its operation.

“As a subprime auto lending company deploying automated decision algorithms, it is vital that we rapidly develop and implement highly predictive models to accurately assess the credit worthiness of applicants,” said Jorge Andres Amo, vice president and head of predictive modeling for Global Lending Services (GLS), a subprime auto-finance company providing financing to franchise dealerships across the U.S.

“A complete picture of risk allows us to make the right offer with the right terms while protecting our business,” Amo continued in a news release. “A platform-based approach like Data Decisions Connected Platform can be a key enabler for lenders who want fast time-to-market using industry-leading technology.”

As a key component of the Data Decisions Cloud suite, FICO indicated the new connected platform can provide organizations with the ability to bring together disparate internal, external and third-party data through an open platform. The offering can allow for the design of predictive models and advanced analytic artifacts that can easily be put into production by complimenting a company’s existing technology investments.

The companies also highlighted the combination of bureau data and attributes, FICO scores, and proprietary data finance companies already possess can enable the creation and execution of market-leading strategies. Officials believe this combination can result in the ability to make better portfolio and strategy decisions such as:

— When to initiate a credit line increase or decrease and by how much

— The delivery of relevant cross-sell and up-sell opportunities at the right time

— Expansion to the right geographic locations

— Improved customer management

Using explainable artificial intelligence (xAI), the companies emphasized the Data Decisions Cloud suite can empower teams to build world-class predictive models and advanced analytics that leverage the latest machine learning algorithms.

“The Data Decisions Cloud and Connected Platform offering have set a new standard in speed from data insight to action,” Equifax chief executive officer Mark Begor said in a news release. “Equifax and FICO have seamlessly combined industry leading data with the best available digital decisioning capabilities to address the spectrum of needs with respect to risk, marketing fraud and compliance.

“We are enabling organizations to service their customers faster and more precisely than ever before,” Begor continued.

FICO chief executive officer William Lansing elaborated about those points.

“Together, FICO and Equifax are helping organizations to operationalize the use of differentiated data assets, machine learning and artificial intelligence,” Lansing said. “The availability of our Data Decisions Cloud suite delivers on our mission to empower financial institutions to leverage data-driven decisioning in a way that builds lasting customer relationships and stronger businesses.”

Equifax and FICO noted the Data Decisions Cloud suite was built on a foundation of differentiated data, so that organizations can gain critical business insights, apply those insights to business decisions and seamlessly deploy those decisions into production.  This suite includes the Connected Platform and two new solutions:

— Data Decisions AML Connect: AML Connect can help financial institutions minimize their exposure to criminal risk, identify potential financial crime and assist with compliance with respect to requirements for the Anti-Money Laundering and Bank Secrecy Act to help avoid heavy fines or other penalties associated with non-compliance. A fully managed real-time cloud solution for assisting with the prevention of money laundering, AML Connect can provide comprehensive and differentiated compliance data alongside dedicated and experienced compliance staff to reduce internal resource requirements and reduce the burden on financial services compliance teams.

— Data Decisions PrescreenCentral: Created specifically for small and mid-sized banks facing increased competition for market share, the companies believe PrescreenCentral is an affordable and flexible prescreen marketing solution designed with Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA)  guidelines in mind. While other services require minimum print runs or data purchases, PrescreenCentral can provide transactional pricing that allows for smaller, more targeted campaigns to identify new customers and market pre-approved offers.

The full Data Decisions Cloud suite now is available from Equifax and FICO.

For more information on the Connected Platform or the AML Connect and PrescreenCentral offerings, visit www.datadecisionscloud.com/.

FICO releases machine-learning cyber risk score on AWS Marketplace

Continuing the developments originating from FICO World 2019, the company also announced the latest release of the FICO Cyber Risk Score is now available on AWS Marketplace.

FICO contends the latest release of the FICO Cyber Risk Score exceeds the published performance results of competitors by a factor of more than five times, “further solidifying FICO’s position as the most accurate security rating on the market.”

Officials reiterated AWS Marketplace is a digital catalog with thousands of software listings from independent software vendors that designed to make it easy to test, buy, and deploy software that runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

With this release, the company explained FICO’s scoring algorithm uses new globally collected micro signal data that improves the ability to quantify the risk an organization will suffer a debilitating cyber-attack in the next 12 months. These micro signals can provide additional security risk indicators that are especially useful in evaluating small and medium-sized businesses.

“Cyber insurers all too frequently see the devastating impact that poor vendor risk management can have on an organization,” said Richard Spotswood, head of cyber and technology at Barbican Insurance.

“How these organizations assess and manage the cyber risk of third parties in their supply chain is of growing importance to insurance carriers and can help differentiate prospective insureds,” Spotswood continued in a news release. “FICO delivers an objective and empirical standard to help organizations in this assessment process, while AWS Marketplace makes this capability more easily accessible to all organizations.”

Doug Clare, FICO’s vice president for cybersecurity solutions, also discussed the importance of this latest release.

“Small and medium-sized businesses often have a smaller internet footprint than larger organizations, making specialized risk assessment techniques especially important,” Clare said.

“Our new score gives both cyber insurance underwriters and vendor risk management teams the ability to measure security posture and breach exposure across their entire supply chain, along with workflows and dashboards designed specifically to stratify, compare and manage aggregate risk,” he continued.

Garth Fort, director of the AWS Marketplace with Amazon Web Services, touched on how this tool blends with his firm’s offerings.

“AWS Marketplace makes it is easier to discover, evaluate and procure the FICO Cyber Risk Score,” Fort said. “Given the level of urgency organizations have to address cyber risk, the streamlined contracting and provisioning process of AWS Marketplace expedites our customers’ ability to realize value from cyber security solutions.”

On Nov. 19, FICO will host a complimentary webinar titled, “Quantifying Cyber Risk across the Supply Chain.” This session will highlight how the FICO Cyber Risk Score can enable organizations to apply objective security ratings to vendor selection, categorization and management.

In addition, registrants will receive a summary of the 2019 Cyber Risk Quantification Solutions report by Chartis Research, which explains the importance of adopting a rigorous supply chain risk management regime and includes an analysis that rates FICO as category leader. Interested executives and managers can register here.

“Empirical cyber risk quantification is on the wish list of information security professionals, vendor risk managers, executive teams and board members around the globe,” Clare said. “Our new third-party risk management dashboards offer cyber risk visibility across the supply chain, all backed by the rigorous methodologies and analytical expertise that have made FICO the trusted name in risk scoring.”

To learn more about the FICO Cyber Risk Score, visit cyberscore.fico.com.

FICO incorporates AI-powered authentication to fight fraud

FICO also boosted its fraud prevention capabilities via an acquisition also announced during FICO World 2019

FICO announced that it is adding two new product families to its portfolio:

— FICO Identity Proofing, which can allow organizations to digitally onboard new customers without requiring in-person verification

— FICO User Authentication, a comprehensive suite of capabilities including multifactor, biometric, and behavioral authentication

To support this effort, FICO has acquired EZMCOM, whose products are used by banks across the globe to protect more than 60 million customers.

With FICO Identity Proofing, organizations can verify customers’ identities by having them take selfies with their government-issued IDs. Within seconds, Identity Proofing can verify the ID’s legitimacy perform an AI-driven biometric analysis between the ID picture and the selfie and perform liveness tests against the selfie to prevent spoofing.

FICO Authentication Suite can offer organizations the power of layered authentication controls including multifactor, biometric and behavioral factors. State of the art keystroke analysis and device telemetry can facilitate a frictionless approach to verify legitimate customers. Machine learning driven risk scores can invoke step-up actions to multifactor or biometric options — to reduce account takeover fraud, while streamlining the customer experience.

Together, FICO highlighted the products can provide a platform to establish and sustain trust in the digital identity, offering easy-to-use, integrated security across the customer lifecycle to support fully digital onboarding, eKYC, and PSD2 mandated strong customer authentication.

“FICO Identity Proofing and FICO Authentication Suite are strong complements to the FICO platform and demonstrate FICO’s ongoing commitment to manage risk and optimize customer interactions across the lifecycle,” the company said in a news release.

Officials mentioned EZMCOM joins FICO with strong references for real-world results. Hong Leong Bank’s Jagjit Kaur, general manager for wholesale digital and transaction banking shared, “EZMCOM is a valuable security partner. Their unified authentication platform centralized our authentication infrastructure and lowered costs. We are discovering security transformation benefits with EZMCOM’s innovation and expanding their platform across multiple regional operations.”

FICO mentioned its clients using the FICO Falcon Fraud Manager solution will be particularly interested in understanding the account takeover and strong customer authentication capabilities that these new solutions provide; they are strong additions to the flexible, AI-empowered capabilities FICO announced with its launch of FICO Falcon® X at the Finovate conference in New York this September.

“As our clients expand their digital offerings, they are requesting more sophisticated identity proofing and authentication capabilities to complement our fraud, compliance, customer lifecycle, and customer engagement applications,” FICO chief technology officer Claus Moldt said.

“Behavioral and biometric authentication are becoming the gold standard to prevent identity spoofing and improve customer protection, while reducing friction,” Moldt continued. “By adding this technology to our portfolio, we will provide our clients with a seamless approach to authentication and customer onboarding – across digital channels, mobile devices, servers and workstations.”

For more information about FICO Authentication Suite, visit this website, and for more details about FICO Identity Proofing, go to this webpage.

PULSE taps FICO to facilitate fraud innovation in debit services

Finally wrapping up the developments rolling out of FICO World 2019, officials announced PULSE, one of the nation’s leading debit/ATM networks, recently adopted the FICO Falcon Platform to deliver new fraud-detection services to its network of more than 4,100 debit issuers.

Collaborating with FICO, PULSE deployed enhanced fraud-detection and blocking capabilities to its issuers with customized capabilities made possible by the power of the FICO Falcon Platform.

In addition to a real-time scoring deployment, PULSE and FICO recapped that they built new capabilities designed to empower the debit network to offer issuers greater flexibility in managing their unique portfolios and requirements through improved case-management functionality.

The FICO Falcon Platform is designed to improve the consumer experience by detecting potential fraud while remaining invisible during legitimate transactions.

PULSE said it considered many vendors, but ultimately selected FICO to provide the foundation of its DebitProtect fraud-detection service.

“In this era of digital commerce, criminals constantly work to beat the system, so the system has to work equally hard to keep up,” PULSE president Dave Schneider said in a news release.

“With the Falcon Platform and its team of experts, we have the flexibility and capacity needed to create and launch new fraud-detection and risk-mitigation services that are benefiting our issuers today, and we have a foundation we can build upon into the future,” Schneider continued.

The new case management functionality can assist issuers in reducing costs by enabling them to more accurately manage groups of compromised cards, as well as allowing or restricting transactions for individual or multiple accounts. The companies insisted this improves the customer experience by reducing disruption of legitimate transactions and cardholders.

Executives added the increased capacity and flexibility provided by FICO gives PULSE the ability to implement more custom fraud-blocking rules for its issuers, and to implement the rules faster than was previously possible. 

“We’re thrilled PULSE selected FICO and our team to build and deliver new real-time fraud-detection services collaboratively,” said TJ Horan, vice president of product management at FICO. “Together, our experts created new tools that issuers can use to mitigate risk.

“We know that as electronic payments evolve, security risks do, too,” Horan continued. “That’s why we work with innovators like PULSE, and it’s why we designed the Falcon Platform to be flexible enough to adapt to the challenges our clients face.”