Want to protect yourself online - and protect your family - from data compromise and identity theft?FICO's Doug Clare, vice president for cybersecurity solutions, offers some advice in this interview with NBC King 5 News in Seattle. He was

Are FICO Scores “Artificially Inflated?”

May 3rd, 2019

A recent Bloomberg article asserted that “consumer credit scores have been artificially inflated over the past decade,” as credit scores have steadily increased over the past decade of economic expansion. The conclusion cited is that “debtors

Synthetic Identities: From Data Breaches to Auto Loan Fraud

May 2nd, 2019

Fraud and data breaches have always had a close, if destructive, relationship. As the US transitioned to hard-to-counterfeit EMV payment card technology several years ago, criminals flocked to card not present (CNP) fraud, often combining ident

AI AML Models Help Find the Bad Eggs

Apr 23rd, 2019

Hope you had a relaxing Easter weekend with family and friends! In between coloring eggs, if you picked up a paper or scrolled through a news site, you probably would have seen the news that $130 million cash was found at the house of the ouste

How Lenders Can Better Support Small Business Growth in their Communities

Nov 29th, 2018

Small business credit access grew in 2018 and with modifications to the Small Business Administration (SBA) rules for more streamlined processing, access is predicted to grow. However, untapped opportunities for growth remain for startups and m

AML Case Management: A Better Approach

Oct 2nd, 2018

In the past few years, we have seen increasing pressure on compliance officers to investigate for new money laundering schemes. Many banks addressed this by putting more effort into working alerts.This is not the best approach to AML case man

Machine Learning and the FICO Score

Sep 28th, 2018

Greetings from sunny (and humid) Miami! I had the pleasure of speaking on a panel at ABS East yesterday, entitled “Traditional vs Non-Traditional Underwriting, Does Machine Learning Teach Us Anything New?”The panel primarily focused on the o

Fintech Policy in the US – Things Are Things Heating Up

Aug 27th, 2018

It’s August and it’s hot in Washington DC. Yet in the nation’s capital, fintech policy may actually be hotter than the temperatures outside. Much of the latest buzz has come from the recently released Treasury report which focuses largely on

Expenses Abuse: What Is The Cost Of A $4 Beer?

Aug 6th, 2018

Expenses Abuse Gets Media and Tax Payers In A FrothRecent news articles out of Ohio ($4 beer dings Butler County Visitors Bureau in state audit) highlights the reputational risks that can impact an organization when it fails to monitor spendin

Banking Solutions: Reduce Complexity, Increase Sophistication

Apr 19th, 2018

FICO WORLD 2018, MIAMI, FloridaFICO today unveiled a host of new retail banking solutions that allow lenders to manage the credit lifecycle in a way that is smarter, faster and simpler. The innovations are designed to help support lenders with

Identifying Tax Fraud through Social Network Analysis

Mar 16th, 2018

Social Network Analysis (SNA) tools hold the potential to help tax and revenue agencies identify non-compliance and tax fraud. These tools have been proven to be effective in fraud detection¹, but to date haven’t been utilized to any large deg

Today’s Deep Dive: Innovative Unsupervised Learning in AI

Jan 22nd, 2018

Categorically, artificial intelligence (AI) can appear be an odd juxtaposition of order and disorder — we direct the AI with algorithms, yet the system produces new insights seemingly magically. This two-part blog unpacks the mysteries of two v

Churn Prevention: New UK Rules Make Analytics Vital

Jan 4th, 2018

Whilst UK consumers are likely to be enthused by the reforms around switching mobile provider and switch requests announced by Ofcom recently, this will give mobile operators an additional regulatory headache when it comes to churn prevention.

Top 5 Risk Analytics Posts: From Rising FICO Scores to Alt-Data

Jan 2nd, 2018

What were some of the most interesting risk analytics topics last year? Judging from the views on the FICO Blog, risk professionals are keenly interested in new ways to approach risk analytics.Here were the top 5 posts of 2017 in the Risk & C

Banking Regulation Predictions 2018: U.S. Reform Takes Off

Dec 20th, 2017

Last year, my regulatory predictions offered little suspense. The winds of change were howling and it was clear that the New Year would be dramatically different than previous ones for those in the U.S. financial services industry. The surprise

Cybersecurity Predictions 2018: Cyber Scores and Stolen Eyes

Dec 18th, 2017

“The more things change, the more they stay the same.” That 1849 quip from Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr somehow seems fitting for today’s cybersecurity industry. In 2017 we saw massive change in the speed, creativity and magnitude of attacks — y

3 Reasons Why PSD2 Could Mean Fewer Card Transactions

Dec 18th, 2017

The use of credit and debit cards has grown for decades, and many observers, including Payments UK, are expecting growth in both value and volume of payments to continue. Recently this has been driven by the increase in the use of contactless p

What’s Happening While We Wait for TCPA Reform?

Dec 13th, 2017

The election of a new administration along with leadership changes at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) provided new hope for a broad group of industry and nonprofit organizations who have long been advocating for changes to the Telep

The Fraud Consortium: 9,000 Heads Are Better than 1

Dec 6th, 2017

There has been a lot of noise in the fraud marketplace from new market entrants touting the power of machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI) and “new data sources” to fight fraud. Regarding ML and AI, FICO Chief Analytics Officer Sc

Morris Dancing, the Bubonic Plague and IFRS 9

Dec 4th, 2017

Within walking distance of Old Town and next to the city’s largest green space, the University of Edinburgh welcomed a very international and highly skilled group of data scientists to discuss the hottest topics in credit scoring and related to

Using AI and Machine Learning to Improve AML

Nov 22nd, 2017

When the sheer computing power of AI meets the transactional complexity of AML, good things happen. I recently had an opportunity to talk about this at the annual Edinburgh Credit Scoring and Control conference. This is a topic I am quite passi

Using AI and Machine Learning to Improve AML

Nov 22nd, 2017

5 Hot Topics in Credit Scoring from Edinburgh

Nov 16th, 2017

If you want to seek out the newest ideas in credit scoring — a field that advances more rapidly than many people may suspect — the best place is the annual Edinburgh Credit Scoring and Control conference (well, next to our own FICO World). At t

Psychometrics and FICO Scores — An Odd Match?

Sep 28th, 2017

Lenders are looking for new ways to connect with the estimated 3 billion people worldwide who fall outside the credit mainstream. These “credit invisibles” don’t have credit cards, bank accounts or credit history — so how can a lender assess th

Explainable AI in Fraud Detection – A Back to the Future Story

Sep 27th, 2017

In 1992, Falcon Fraud Manager was introduced: a neural network-based fraud detection system that detects fraudulent payment card transactions in real-time. Since then, despite the proliferation of fraud types, there has been a dramatic reductio