Avon Grows Business and Cuts Bad Debt in Brazil with Cloud-Hosted FICO Decisioning Platform

SÃO PAULO, April 5, 2021 /PRNewswire/ --

Highlights:

• Avon reduces its representatives' bad debt indicators by 72% using FICO^® Platform from 2018 to 2020
• Avon automates 90% of individual credit limit increase requests made by representatives
• Avon won a 2021 FICO® Decisions Award for cloud deployment

Avon, part of the Natura & Co Group and one of the largest direct selling companies in the world, has used the FICO^® Platform to improve its credit granting in Brazil, reducing its representatives' bad debt indicators by 72 percent. Avon was also able to automate 90 percent of limit increase requests made by sales representatives. This action had a positive impact, leading to an increase in the number of active representatives who started buying products in every campaign. Importantly, the user-friendly nature of the platform allows credit managers to implement policies themselves in a matter of hours.

More information: https://www.fico.com/en/platform

Before the implementation, the company had been experiencing issues with high levels of default by its representatives, especially on first orders. One of the key issues was that the systems in place were operating in silos and credit policy was based on regions instead of being individualized. It became clear that the existing infrastructure would not be able to offer Avon the agility, interoperability, and decision quality it needed.

"One of the biggest challenges we helped solve for Avon on this project was the extraction of data from the previous system, which was not built to work with data intelligence," said Alexandre Graff, FICO vice president and general manager for Latin America. "This was solved by dividing the project into stages as we integrated new tools, migrated databases and integrated third party solutions such as Salesforce. The move to a modern cloud-based credit decision engine has delivered Avon a significant business boost."

By deploying the FICO system on the cloud, Avon was able to create intelligent rules driven by data, deliver business users increased autonomy to calibrate policy with less dependence on the IT team, and produce an audit trail that tracked the changes made.

The flexibility of the system was a great benefit to Avon. Policy changes that used to take up to six months to complete due to the workload of its IT department can now be completed in a few hours by the credit team.

Using the capabilities on the FICO® Platform, Avon was able to run champion/challenger tests on policy changes, score credit applications, create contingency plans and integrate directly with applications such as Salesforce. Through the connection with Salesforce, Avon has been able to automate 90 percent of individual credit limit increase requests.

The Avon toolset includes FICO^® Decision Modeler - Cloud Edition, FICO^® Model Translator, FICO® Application Studio SaaS and of course FICO^® Decision Management Platform - Cloud Edition

"Avon has undertaken a transformational and comprehensive cloud deployment," said Nikhil Behl chief marketing officer at FICO. "Avon is a great example of how organizations can optimize and automate critical business functions such as the credit granting process, to make them faster, safer and more efficient."

For its achievements, Avon won a 2021 FICO® Decisions Award for Cloud Deployment.

"The Avon story is really remarkable," said René Javier Guzmán, market & liquidity risks director at Banreservas and one of the FICO Decisions Awards judges. "The scale and geography of a market like Brazil delivers many challenges, such as attempting to assess someone without a face-to-face meeting and needing to rely on data alone. The judges were impressed with the level of automation and decision transformation achieved in a year by Avon, and the way company cultivated its relationship with its representatives."

The FICO® Platform provides the ideal decisioning foundation companies need to successfully achieve digital transformation. It provides unprecedented insight into customers' immediate and future needs by eliminating data silos and enabling interoperability between enterprise applications. FICO was named a leader by Forrester Research in The Forrester Wave™: Digital Decisioning Platforms, Q4 2020.

About Avon
Avon, part of the Natura & Co Group since 2020, is one of the largest direct selling companies in the world. Founded in 1886, it works to raise self-esteem, democratize beauty and promote female entrepreneurship. Since starting operations in Brazil in 1958, it has grown a salesforce of around 1.3 million representatives. Avon is more than a beauty company: it is a global movement for women's autonomy, with a business model anchored in innovation, the generation of opportunities and the expansion of entrepreneurial skills, with the objective of strengthening economies and positively impacting society.

Its diverse portfolio includes innovative and high-tech products, with world-renowned brands such as Avon and Color Trend makeup lines, personal care lines Renew and Avon Care and the perfumes Far Away and 300km. In addition, the Avon magazine also offer several Fashion & Home items.

For more information about Avon, visit the website: www.avon.com.br

About the FICO® Decisions Awards
The FICO Decisions Awards recognize organizations that are achieving remarkable success using FICO solutions. A panel of independent judges with deep industry expertise evaluates nominations based upon measurable improvement in key metrics; demonstrated use of best practices; project scale, depth and breadth; and innovative uses of technology. The 2021 judges are:

• Prasanna Dhoré, chief data & analytics and innovation officer, Equifax
• David Dittmann, vice president, data & analytics, P&G (2019 winner)
• René Javier Guzmán, market & liquidity risks director at Banreservas (2019 winner)
• Tomas Klinger, decision science and data director at Home Credit (2019 winner)
• Marcel Le Gouais, managing editor at Credit Strategy
• Tiffani Montez, banking analyst at Aite
• Lisa Morgan, journalist & analyst at InformationWeek
• Ignazio Provinzano, head of risk operations at Swisscard (2019 winner)

The winners of the FICO Decisions Awards will be spotlighted at and win tickets to FICO® World 2021, the Decisions Conference, November 2021 in Orlando, Florida.

About FICO
FICO (NYSE: FICO) powers decisions that help people and businesses around the world prosper. Founded in 1956 and based in Silicon Valley, the company is a pioneer in the use of predictive analytics and data science to improve operational decisions. FICO holds more than 195 US and foreign patents on technologies that increase profitability, customer satisfaction and growth for businesses in financial services, manufacturing, telecommunications, health care, retail and many other industries. Using FICO solutions, businesses in more than 120 countries do everything from protecting 2.6 billion payment cards from fraud, to helping people get credit, to ensuring that millions of airplanes and rental cars are in the right place at the right time.

FICO is a registered trademark of Fair Isaac Corporation in the US and other countries.

SOURCE FICO

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