He later worked in arbitrage trading systems for Citibank, then spent 12 years at IBM, achieving “near double-digit growth” for its Global Banking Unit, which has annual revenues more than 14 times those of Fair Isaac.
“I’ve been in and around banking for most of my career,” he says. “I understand what Fair Isaac’s clients do for a living. I’m able to go in and talk to them about their business problems: How can I improve my client-retention rates? How do I figure out which customers are about to defect to the guy down the street and prevent that from happening? How can I sell more products to my existing customers, and what should they be? Will they buy a mortgage from me? If so, at what price?
“It’s that kind of conversation that my background enables me to have,” he says. And that’s the kind of conversation Fair Isaac’s salespeople need to have with clients to make those broad, deep, enterprise-level sales.“At the end of the day, what we sell is technology that enables these business strategies,” Greene adds. “But first you talk about the business problem.”
Fair Isaac’s problems are readily fixable, he says, in part with different training for salespeople. “These are basic blocking-and-tackling kinds of things we’re talking about: prioritizing which customers you go after, making sure you deliver A-class service, having a world-class sales team. Notice what I’m not mentioning needs attention. I’m not saying we have bad products or that we’re in bad markets or that we don’t have the right people in place.”
Analysts generally agree with Greene. Now they’re waiting to see results. In June, Standard & Poor’s analyst Zaineb Bokhari praised Fair Isaac’s “diverse portfolio of differentiated analytic solutions,” but said “execution has been poor.” Bokhari expects Greene to “undertake measures to reinvigorate growth,” but warns investors not to anticipate “meaningful progress” until late in fiscal 2007 or early 2008.
Argus Research analyst Bridget Adams sees “[large] growth opportunities” for Fair Isaac in international markets and believes that “Dr. Greene’s expertise and successful track record is a positive for Fair Isaac.” In light of the shaky mortgage market, the threat from the new Vantage-Scores system, and those historic “execution” problems, however, she and Bokhari join Citigroup’s Tony Wible in putting a “hold” rating on the stock.
Greene vows that the market soon can quit worrying about execution. Fair Isaac, he insists, has “great fundamentals . . . . [The task] has to do with improving our sales capability, treating our customer a little better than we have, executing a little better, and just running a sharper railroad. But we don’t have to lay the tracks.”
