People all around the world will soon be able to experience dealing with FICO scores soon.
Fair Isaac Corp is setting its sights on expanding its FICO credit scoring business internationally, senior executives at the firm told ComputerWire in a recent interview.
“From a brand perspective, our FICO credit score is already the gold standard for credit decision making in the US,” said Michael Chiappetta, vice president, EDM technology and custom solutions at Fair Isaac.
“So it’s an ideal lead product for us to take out to the rest of the world.”
Fair Isaac is looking to replicate that success of FICO in the US financial services sector overseas.
Right now, less than 30% of FICO business originates from outside US.
The company is aiming to grow that to at least 50% in the next year and a half.
“We’re in 16 international markets right now and will be looking to be in ten more within the next 18 months through international credit bureaus, and directly via local banks and multinational lenders with our Global FICO offerings” said Eric Educate, Fair Isaac’s chief marketing officer.
“We’ll be targeting a combination of credit bureaus as well as local banks and multinational lenders.”
FICO, which is an acronym for “Fair Isaac Corp”, is a predictive credit scoring system that is used extensively by US businesses to gauge the credit risk and worthiness of consumers when they apply for credit cards and other loans.
Technically, FICO system sits as one of the core predictive analytics components of Fair Isaac’s enterprise decision management platform that also includes descriptive modeling, rules management and other “decisoning” technologies.
Educate is confident of growing the FICO business internationally, pointing to a “big boom in consumer credit” and the subsequent emergence of new markets in countries that previously lacked any credit bureau infrastructure.
Educate estimates around 60 countries are now putting such an infrastructure in place.
There is also increased pressure from local governments in these new markets that want to avoid lenders “overheating” their economies with risky credit.
“They’re looking for a consistent yet flexible set of scoring algorithms that work against wide set of credit bureau data.
The key is to have a successful aggregation of credit data that is linked back to lenders and credit bureaus,” Educate said.
He added that international expansion is also being driven by the increased multinational needs of Fair Isaac’s US and European financial services and banking customers.
“These clients are expanding their businesses and are bringing us into new markets where they want similar credit scoring solutions,” he said.
“We already do FICO business with around 30 multinational lenders and are looking at a way to come up withy a consistent FICO score and metrics that can be applied in different international markets.”
Fair Isaac expects its FICO business to close at least 15 new deals internationally over the next six months that will pull the company into at least six new markets.
But the company also acknowledges that international FICO business will have to be developed differently than in the US, where it relies primarily on credit bureaus to distribute its services.
“Internationally we’ll install more FICO credit systems at the customer site itself,” Educate said.
Fair Isaac Goes Global with FICO (ComputerWire via Yahoo!7 News)
Fair Isaac Corp is setting its sights on expanding its FICO credit scoring business internationally, senior executives at the firm told ComputerWire in a recent interview.
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