FICO CEO Will Lansing Tells Bankers They Must Embrace Big Data Analytics to Regain Customers' Trust and Loyalty

MIAMI, May 1, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- FICO World -- FICO (NYSE: FICO), a leading predictive analytics and decision management software company, today began the second day of FICO World 2013 with keynote presentations by CEO Will Lansing and Kenneth Cukier, data editor for The Economist and co-author of Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think. Both speakers painted a vision of a future where Big Data will give banks, retailers and other businesses unprecedented power to understand their customers and build more successful relationships — if those businesses can decode the data faster and better.

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"Your customers have higher expectations and more control – that's the customer revolution," Lansing said in his opening remarks this morning to a packed house of 800+ bankers, retailers, credit grantors, technology experts and FICO staff from 44 countries. "Your customers know you have their data and they wonder what that's doing for them."

Lansing described five areas where FICO analytic software can help businesses meet customer's new demands. "As your customer, I want you to protect my money, make me an offer I can't refuse, treat me with respect, not waste my time and help me live better." He explained how FICO is helping clients address each of these demands through its acquisitions over the past year — including Adeptra, InfoGlide, CR Software and Entiera. He also described new FICO analytic innovations that provide greater insight into customer behavior, and better identification of fraud and payment default risks.

Big Data is changing the game for banks, and for analytics software companies like FICO, Lansing said: "For more than 50 years, we have lived in a small data world, seeking the data set with the highest predictive value. That made sense when we were constrained by the volume of data that we could store and manipulate. Now those constraints are gone. The three V's of Big Data – volume, variety, and velocity – raise the stakes for analytics players to take advantage of the emerging big data infrastructure and help our clients get more value from data and make ever better decisions."

"We can do things with more data that simply weren't possible with smaller data sets," Kenneth Cukier said in his address. He argued that to make better use of Big Data, we need to change our propensity to know the cause-and-effect relationship between events.

"What's important with Big Data is finding correlations between data and events, rather than causation — knowing what, rather than why," Cukier said. "Often, we don't need to know causation to do something useful with data relationships, and when we think we do know the causation, we are often deluded."

Because Big Data analysis is so complex, Cukier said that a means of preserving transparency and accountability will be important. "We may need to create a new class of professionals — call them 'algorithmists' — who will audit a business's use of Big Data, the same way that accountants do today with a business's finances."

At FICO's 35^th conference, attendees are exploring how Big Data analytics is being used to better understand customer needs, pinpoint risk, improve marketing, enhance the customer experience, combat fraud, and drive profitability. The conference features more than 80 presentations from FICO Labs data scientists and 60 organizations from around the world. Sponsors for the four-day conference include Equifax, TSYS, Corelogic, Fiserv, BankersLab, The Five Star Institute, Mendix, FIS and First Data. FICO World runs April 30 through May 3 at the Hilton Miami Downtown.  

The latest news from FICO World is available at http://www.fico.com/en/Company/News and on Twitter at @ficoworld and @ficonews.

About FICO
FICO (NYSE:FICO) delivers superior predictive analytics solutions that drive smarter decisions. The company's groundbreaking use of mathematics to predict consumer behavior has transformed entire industries and revolutionized the way risk is managed and products are marketed. FICO's innovative solutions include the FICO^® Score — the standard measure of consumer credit risk in the United States — along with industry-leading solutions for managing credit accounts, identifying and minimizing the impact of fraud, and customizing consumer offers with pinpoint accuracy. Most of the world's top banks, as well as leading insurers, retailers, pharmaceutical companies and government agencies, rely on FICO solutions to accelerate growth, control risk, boost profits and meet regulatory and competitive demands. FICO also helps millions of individuals manage their personal credit health through www.myFICO.com.

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Statement Concerning Forward-Looking Information
Except for historical information contained herein, the statements contained in this news release that relate to FICO or its business are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the "safe harbor" provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially, including the success of the Company's Decision Management strategy and reengineering plan, the maintenance of its existing relationships and ability to create new relationships with customers and key alliance partners, its ability to continue to develop new and enhanced products and services, its ability to recruit and retain key technical and managerial personnel, competition, regulatory changes applicable to the use of consumer credit and other data, the failure to realize the anticipated benefits of any acquisitions, continuing material adverse developments in global economic conditions, and other risks described from time to time in FICO's SEC reports, including its Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended September 30, 2012 and its last quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the period ended March 31, 2013. If any of these risks or uncertainties materializes, FICO's results could differ materially from its expectations. FICO disclaims any intent or obligation to update these forward-looking statements.

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