What Fair Isaac Predicts

Connect the Dots

Establishing those priorities is a work in progress. Greene says he is not yet ready to rule out opportunities or identify industries that Fair Isaac will not pursue.

Acquisitions are likely to play a role in the company’s future, he says, primarily with an eye to buying new technology rather than revenues or customers. As for organic growth, Fair Isaac already does business in 80 countries, but “we will grow geographically,” paying particular attention to Eastern Europe and especially China, Greene says. The overseas focus will be in banking. Chinese banks, for example, face enormous uncertainties when making loan decisions in a rapidly expanding market of newly minted consumers and businesses. While the Western-style credit histories upon which FICO scores are based often do not exist, Greene says, Fair Isaac has the expertise required to help Chinese lenders create a locally valid risk-reduction system.

Another priority will be to expand business in industries other than banking, with emphasis on those where the company already has a toehold—insurance, telecommunications, retail, and health care.

In all of those industries, and in its core financial market, enterprise decision management will come into play. The EDM push will “connect the dots among Fair Isaac’s existing products,” Greene says, and help companies manage the entire “customer life cycle.” That might include identifying the best prospects to market to, deciding whether to “originate” a new customer (by approving a loan, for instance), servicing the customer, handling claims, guarding against fraudulent activity in the account, deciding which additional products or services to offer the customer, and trying to collect a debt.

Fair Isaac has software that addresses each of those activities—roughly 100 products in all, Greene says. But to function in “enterprise” terms, those products and future ones need smoother links to help overcome the notorious “silo” obstacles that exist in most large organizations.

In the case of a bank, the people who manage the credit-card relationship with you are different from the people who handle your mortgage, or the ones who deal with your car loan. “All of those people are inside the bank,” he explains, “but they have great difficulty connecting the dots so that they can say [of a customer], ‘Hey, this is all the same guy we’re talking about. And if we took an overarching view of our relationship with him, we might do something quite different.’”

Like what, for instance? For one thing, the bank might be better able to decide not just whether to do business with a customer, but how much business to do.