Fair Isaac Corporation (FICO) is an applied analytics company.
FICO’s software and the widely used FICO Score operationalize analytics, enabling thousands of businesses in more than 80 countries to uncover new opportunities, make timely decisions that matter, and execute them at scale. Most leading banks and credit card issuers rely on the company’s solutions, as do insurers, retailers, telecommunications providers, automotive lenders, consumer reporting agencies, public agencies, and organizat...
Fair Isaac Corporation (FICO) is an applied analytics company.
FICO’s software and the widely used FICO Score operationalize analytics, enabling thousands of businesses in more than 80 countries to uncover new opportunities, make timely decisions that matter, and execute them at scale. Most leading banks and credit card issuers rely on the company’s solutions, as do insurers, retailers, telecommunications providers, automotive lenders, consumer reporting agencies, public agencies, and organizations in other industries. The company also serves consumers through online services that enable people to access and understand their FICO Scores — the standard measure in the United States (‘U.S.’) of consumer credit risk — empowering them to increase financial literacy and manage their financial health.
Products and Services
The company’s business consists of two operating segments: Scores and Software.
The company’s Scores segment includes its business-to-business (‘B2B’) scoring solutions and services which give the company’s clients access to predictive credit and other scores that can be easily integrated into their transaction streams and decision-making processes. This segment also includes the company’s business-to-consumer (‘B2C’) scoring solutions, including the company’s myFICO.com subscription offerings.
The company’s Software segment includes pre-configured analytic and decision management solutions designed for a specific type of business need or process — such as account origination, customer management, customer engagement, fraud detection, and marketing — as well as associated professional services. This segment also includes FICO Platform, a modular software offering designed to support advanced analytic and decision use cases, as well as stand-alone analytic and decisioning software that can be configured by the company’s customers to address a wide variety of business use cases. The company’s offerings are available to its customers as software-as-a-service (‘SaaS’) or as on-premises software.
Scores
The company’s B2B scoring solutions include the FICO Score, which is the standard measure of consumer credit risk in the U.S. It is used in most U.S. credit decisions, by nearly all major banks, credit card issuers, mortgage lenders, and auto loan originators. The company’s B2B scoring solutions are primarily distributed through major consumer reporting agencies worldwide. The company’s B2C scores are sold directly to consumers through the company’s myFICO.com website and other direct-to-consumer channels.
The FICO Score is a three-digit number ranging from 300-850. The company’s proprietary analytic algorithms are applied to credit data collected and maintained by the three U.S. national consumer reporting agencies — Experian, TransUnion and Equifax — to produce standard scores that are used across the credit lifecycle, including in origination, account management and consumer marketing. Users of the company’s scores generally pay the consumer reporting agencies a fee for each individual score generated by the company’s algorithms, and the consumer reporting agencies pay an associated fee to the company. Except for product development using de-personalized data, FICO does not collect or store the consumer credit data used in the calculation of the company’s scores, and in most cases, the company does not sell the company’s scores directly to lenders or other end-users.
FICO Score 9 introduced the utilization of reported rental payment history, while also de-emphasizing medical debt and disregarding paid collections. The company’s most recent and most predictive scores, FICO Score 10 and 10 T, were introduced in 2020. To increase its predictive power, FICO Score 10 T builds on FICO Score 10 but also incorporates trended credit data. Trended data considers a longer historical view, giving lenders even more insight into how individuals are managing their credit. Updated versions of the company’s FICO Scores are generally designed to provide greater predictive accuracy than the scores they replace, and to be compatible with prior versions of the FICO Score.
In addition to the FICO Score, the company offers several other broad-based scores, including specific FICO Industry Scores. For example, in 2021 the company introduced Bankcard and Auto Industry versions of FICO Score 10. The company also develops various custom scores for its financial services clients.
The FICO Resilience Index offering is designed to complement FICO Score models by identifying those consumers who are more resilient to economic stress relative to other consumers within the same FICO Score bands. The FICO Resilience Index is designed to enable lenders to continue to lend and better manage risk by providing a more precise assessment of loan default risk during periods of economic stress.
FICO has invested significant resources in the development of scores that can help expand credit access and lower borrowing costs for consumers that have limited credit history or who have sparse or inactive credit files. These scores use alternative data sources to enhance conventional credit bureau data and generate scores for otherwise un-scorable consumers and in many cases improve the credit scores of scorable consumers.
FICO Score XD uses public records and property data, and a consumer’s history with mobile phone, landline phone and cable payments, to generate scores on the same 300-850 scale as standard FICO Scores. FICO Score XD is available to lenders through the company’s distribution partners, LexisNexis Risk Solutions and Equifax.
The UltraFICO Score uses consumer-permissioned data such as checking, savings, or money market account data, to generate scores on the same 300-850 scale as standard FICO Scores. Incorporating consumer-permissioned data helps empower consumers to establish or improve their creditworthiness by using data that reflects sound financial activity, but that is not part of a conventional credit report.
Both scores maintain the same score to risk relationship as standard FICO Scores, enhancing their compatibility with existing credit underwriting systems and models.
Outside the U.S., the company offers FICO Scores for consumer loans, and in some cases for small and medium business loans. These scores are typically sold to end-users through consumer reporting agencies in those countries, as they are in the U.S. FICO Scores have been made available in over 40 countries and the company has also developed client-specific versions of the FICO Score in over ten countries that the company sells directly to end-user customers.
The company also provides FICO Scores to consumers in the U.S. through the company’s B2C scoring solutions. These Scores are distributed directly by the company through its myFICO.com subscription offering and indirectly through the company’s licensed distribution partners, including Experian and certain lenders through the FICO Score Open Access Program. Through myFICO.com and other direct-to-consumer channels, consumers can purchase their FICO Scores, including credit reports associated with the scores, explanations of the factors affecting their scores, and customized educational information on how to manage their scores. Consumers can use products to simulate how taking specific actions could affect their FICO Score. Consumers can also subscribe to credit monitoring, which delivers alerts via email and text when changes to a user’s FICO Scores or other credit report content are detected. In addition, consumers can purchase identity theft monitoring products that alert them to potential risks of identity fraud.
Software
The company’s software harnesses the power of analytics and digital decisioning technology to help businesses automate, improve, and connect decisions across their enterprise. Most of the company’s solutions address customer engagement, including acquisition and pricing, onboarding, servicing and management, and fraud protection. The company also helps businesses improve non-customer facing decisions such as supply chain optimization, scheduling management and policy adherence.
FICO provides software solutions to business customers in more than 80 countries around the world. The company’s software can be deployed in the cloud utilizing third-party cloud services, or on-premises using the company’s customers’ IT infrastructure. The company typically sells its software as multi-year subscriptions, with payments based on usage metrics such as the number of accounts, transactions or decisioning use cases deployed, often subject to contracted minimum payments.
A significant and growing number of the company’s software solutions run natively on FICO Platform, a modular software offering designed to support advanced analytics and decisioning use cases. While not all the company’s software runs on FICO Platform today, the company is continuing to invest significant development resources to enable substantially all of the company’s software to run on FICO Platform in the future.
Principal Areas of Expertise
The company specializes in solutions that empower businesses to operationalize analytics to uncover new opportunities, make timely decisions that matter, and execute them at scale. With more than 65 years of analytics and software experience, the company has found that bringing human and digital intelligence together allows the company’s customers to target and acquire customers more efficiently, increase customer value, reduce fraud and credit losses, lower operating expenses, and enter new markets more profitably.
The company’s principal areas of research and development expertise are focused on the following four analytic domains.
Predictive Modeling
Predictive modeling identifies and mathematically represents underlying relationships in historical data to make predictions or classifications about future events. Predictive models typically analyze current and historical data about individuals to produce easily understood metrics such as scores. These scores rank-order individuals or specific transactions against a particular variable such as the likelihood of making credit payments on time, the likelihood of a transaction being fraudulent or the probability of responding to a particular offer for services. The company’s predictive models are frequently used in mission-critical transactional systems and drive decisions and actions in near real time.
Several analytic methodologies underlie the company’s products in this area. These include proprietary applications of both linear and nonlinear optimization algorithms, advanced neural systems, machine learning and AI. The company also applies various statistical techniques for analysis and pattern detection within large datasets and can derive insights and predictive features from various forms of data, including unstructured data.
Decision Analysis and Optimization
Decision analysis refers to the broad quantitative field that deals with modeling, analyzing, and optimizing decisions made by individuals, groups, and organizations. Whereas predictive models analyze multiple aspects of individual behavior to forecast future behavior, decision analysis analyzes multiple aspects of a given decision to identify the most effective action to take to reach a desired result. This is often referred to as prescriptive analytics. The company’s integrated approach to decision analysis incorporates a decision model that mathematically maps the entire decision structure; proprietary optimization technology that identifies the most effective strategies, given both the performance objective and constraints; testing and simulation required for active, continuous learning; and the robust extrapolation of an optimized strategy to a wider set of scenarios than historically encountered. The company’s optimization capabilities also include native support for Python modeling, as well as the company’s own proprietary mathematical modeling and programming language, an easy-to-use authoring environment, a configurable business simulation and scenario management interface and a set of pre-built optimization algorithms.
Transaction Profiling
Transaction profiling is a patent-protected technique used to extract meaningful information and reduce the complexity of transaction data used in modeling. Many of the company’s products operate using transactional data, such as credit card purchase transactions, consumer interactions, or other types of data that change over time. In its raw form, this data is very difficult to use in predictive models for several reasons. First, an isolated transaction contains very little information about the behavior of the individual who generated the transaction. Second, transaction patterns change rapidly over time. Third, this type of data can often be highly complex. To overcome these issues, the company has developed a set of techniques that transform raw transactional data into a mathematical representation that reveals latent information, and which make the data more usable by predictive models. This profiling technology accumulates data across multiple transactions of many types to create and update profiles of transaction patterns. These profiles enable the company’s neural network models to efficiently and effectively make accurate assessments of, for example, fraud risk and credit risk within real-time transaction streams.
Customer Data Integration
Decisions made about customers or prospects can benefit from data stored in multiple sources, both inside and outside the enterprise. In the areas of analytics and digital decisioning, more data is generally better. The company has developed proprietary data ingestion and management tools that are able to assemble and integrate disparate data sources into a unified view of the customer, household, or other subject through the application of persistent keying technology. This data can include structured or unstructured data. In addition, the company’s technology can integrate multiple data sources in real-time and make them available for rapid analysis and decisions such as credit approval, fraud detection and ‘next best offer’ workflows.
The company’s analytic tools and solutions are among the best commercially available, and that the company is uniquely positioned to integrate advanced analytic, software and data technologies into mission-critical business solutions that offer superior returns on investment.
FICO Platform
FICO Platform is an analytic and decisioning environment that empowers businesses to configure solutions that orchestrate and operationalize high velocity decisions that matter, at scale. Users of FICO Platform can bring together data from multiple sources, apply advanced analytics to derive insights, and translate those insights into actions and workflows that can be executed in real-time. Based on a modular cloud architecture, FICO Platform can be configured by the company’s customers to solve a vast array of business challenges. FICO Platform delivers increasing value to the company’s customers over time as they add additional analytic capabilities, configure their own solutions or utilize pre-configured solutions to address a diverse set of use cases and integrate disparate analytic and decisioning silos onto a centralized, scalable platform. This drives additional subscription software revenue for FICO over time as customers purchase more FICO Platform capabilities and pay for more usage of those capabilities.
The company’s intention is to move substantially all of FICO’s current software products onto FICO Platform. For example, FICO’s industry leading rules-based decisioning engine, FICO Blaze Advisor decision rules management system, is now available on FICO Platform as FICO Decision Modeler. In addition, many core capabilities of FICO’s current software products are now part of FICO Platform, enabling solutions such as Originations and Customer Management. This strategy of moving the company’s software products to FICO Platform will result in revenue growth through follow-on ‘land and expand’ sales to existing FICO Platform customers and more sales to medium-sized businesses typically served through value-added resellers and systems integrators.
Offerings
The company sells its software primarily as analytic and decisioning software or pre-configured solutions. The company’s software offerings are sold both individually and as integrated bundles of multiple products.
Analytic and Decisioning Software
FICO analytic and decisioning software offerings use proprietary and open source microservices and capabilities to enable both business users and data scientists to develop and execute advanced analytics and decision modeling. The company’s key products in this category include:
FICO Decision Modeler and FICO Blaze Advisor are the company’s core decision rules modeling tools, which enable users to flexibly author and manage decision rules and strategies. FICO Decision Modeler delivers the functionality of the company’s industry leading FICO Blaze Advisor product, with the added benefit of seamless integration into FICO Platform. FICO Blaze Advisor, the predecessor to FICO Decision Modeler, is available as an off-platform product.
FICO Xpress Optimization provides operations research professionals and business analysts with world-class solvers and productivity tools to determine optimal outcomes for a wide range of industry problems. FICO Xpress Optimization includes a powerful modeling and programming language to quickly model and solve even the largest optimization problems. FICO Xpress Optimization runs on FICO Platform.
FICO Analytics Workbench is a predictive analytics tool that allows businesses to create and deploy explainable machine learning models for use in decisions that typically require strict governance and compliance, often including regulatory oversight. FICO Analytics Workbench runs on FICO Platform.
FICO Data Orchestrator is a data retrieval and mapping solution that can access, gather, and transform data from corporate or public facing information services. FICO Data Orchestrator runs on FICO Platform.
FICO DMP Streaming is a real-time and batch data ingestion solution that uniquely delivers in-stream analytics for real-time data insights and complex event processing.
FICO Business Outcome Simulator enables business users to run a wide variety of insightful scenarios to assess how their business is likely to perform under varying conditions and assumptions. It unlocks insights into how key outcomes will likely shift in the face of changing competitor strategy, macroeconomic changes, evolving customer preferences, and more. FICO Business Outcome Simulator runs on FICO Platform.
FICO Decision Optimizer helps business users understand how different customers will react to a variety of different actions that are being considered. Once that link is understood, FICO Decision Optimizer identifies the combination of actions most likely to lead to the desired portfolio outcomes through decisions such as who to offer a new product, what limit and/or price to offer, or how to treat delinquent customers. FICO Decision Optimizer runs on FICO Platform.
Pre-Configured Solutions
FICO's pre-configured solutions optimize customer interactions in real-time, driving greater customer engagement and improving business results. They enable acquisition and growth marketing, account activation and management, omni-channel communication, risk assessment, and fraud detection and prevention. Key FICO solutions offered include:
FICO Fraud Solutions empower organizations to safeguard the business and their customers from payments fraud and application fraud. Leveraging advanced analytic capabilities on a large scale and in real-time, FICO Fraud Solutions identify fraud and enable strategies designed to prevent fraud across payment cards, money transfers, and instances where stolen or synthetic identities are exploited to open accounts. The company’s models are continually improved using a proprietary, global data set of transaction data contributed by more than 10,000 institutions that participate in the FICO Falcon Intelligence Network. Certain Fraud Solutions capabilities are available on FICO Platform today, and the company plans to make additional Fraud Solutions capabilities available on FICO Platform in the future.
FICO Originations Solution is an application-to-decision credit originations solution. It enables banks, credit unions, finance companies, online lenders, auto lenders, and other companies to automate and improve the processing of requests for credit. The company’s Originations Solution increases the speed, consistency and efficiency with which requests are handled, reducing losses, and increasing approval rates through the application of sophisticated policies and analytics that assess applicant risk and reduce the need for manual review by underwriters. Certain Originations capabilities are available on FICO Platform today, and the company plans to make additional Originations capabilities available on FICO Platform in the future.
FICO Customer Communication Service is an intelligent omnichannel digital communication manager for resolving customer interactions. It enables businesses to automate individualized customer dialogues with the same consistency and regulatory compliance as their human agents. With Customer Communication Service, businesses can be available 24/7 for one-way or two-way communication through any channel their consumers choose. Businesses can rapidly launch mobile alerts, messaging, virtual agents, self-service options, and other auto-resolution capabilities. It helps make the full customer journey more efficient and raises the level of data-driven digital intelligence behind lifecycle communications. Certain Customer Communication capabilities are available on FICO Platform today, and the company plans to make additional Customer Communication capabilities available on FICO Platform in the future.
FICO Strategy Director and FICO TRIAD Customer Manager enable businesses to automate and improve risk-based decisions for their existing credit customers. These products help businesses apply advanced analytics in credit account and customer decisions to increase portfolio revenue and reduce risk exposure and losses, while improving customer retention. They also allow users to manage risk and communications at both the account and customer level from a single place. FICO Strategy Director runs on FICO Platform. FICO TRIAD Customer Manager, the predecessor to FICO Strategy Director, is available as an off-platform product.
FICO Professional Services
FICO offers a range of professional services designed to help customers install and configure the company’s software, develop and deploy advanced analytics using the company’s software, and improve customer satisfaction and retention.
FICO Implementation Services. The company often sells software implementation and configuration services in conjunction with the company’s on-premises and SaaS subscriptions, and the company’s license sales. The FICO implementation services team leverages their deep expertise in the company’s products and their extensive industry-specific knowledge to help the company’s customers implement and configure FICO software rapidly and effectively.
FICO Analytic Services. The company builds custom analytics, decision models and related analytics, and perform machine learning projects for clients in multiple industries. These analytic services help to improve critical business processes and operationalize analytics using FICO software products. Most of the company’s engagements utilize predictive analytics, decision modeling and optimization to provide greater insight into customer preferences and help predict future customer behavior.
FICO Advisors. FICO Advisors are business consultants accelerating the practical use of FICO solutions through data-driven analytics, strategic design, and software applications. The company’s seasoned practitioners are uniquely valued for their credit lifecycle risk and fraud knowledge and can help drive measurable results in an ever-dynamic economic market.
The company’s professional services are sold on an hourly time and materials basis or for a fixed project fee.
Markets and Customers
The company’s scores and software products and services serve clients in multiple industries, including banking, insurance, retail, healthcare and public agencies. End users of the company’s products include three-quarters of each of the largest 100 financial institutions in the U.S. and the largest 100 banks in the world. The company’s clients also include more than 600 insurers, including eight of the top ten U.S. property and casualty insurers; more than 300 retailers and general merchandisers; and more than 200 government or public agencies. Seven of the top ten companies on the 2024 Fortune 500 list use one or more of the company’s solutions. In addition, the company’s consumer solutions are marketed to more than 200 million U.S. consumers whose credit relationships are reported to the three major U.S. consumer reporting agencies.
The majority of the company’s scores are marketed and sold through consumer reporting agencies. During fiscal 2024, revenues generated from the company’s agreements with Experian, TransUnion and Equifax collectively accounted for 45% of the company’s total revenues. The company also sells its scores and credit monitoring directly to consumers through the company’s myFICO.com on-line subscription offerings. Outside of the U.S., the company sells its scores through consumer reporting agencies, other third-party distributors, and in some cases directly to large end-users.
The company markets its software products and services primarily through the company’s own direct sales organization that is organized around vertical and geographic markets. Sales teams are based in the company’s headquarters and in field offices strategically located around the world. The company also markets its products through indirect channels, including alliance partners and other resellers. As more capabilities are made available on FICO Platform, the company expects its sales through indirect channels to grow. The company is investing significant resources to develop its indirect channel relationships.
The company’s largest market segment is financial services, representing 92% of the company’s total revenue during fiscal 2024. The company’s largest geographic market is the Americas, representing 84% of the company’s total revenue during the year ended September 30, 2024 (fiscal 2024).
Competition
Scores
In the company’s Scores segment, the company competes with both outside suppliers and in-house analytics. Primary competitors among outside suppliers of scoring models are the three major consumer reporting agencies in the U.S. and Canada, which are also the company’s partners in offering the company’s scoring solutions, and VantageScore (a joint venture entity established by the three major U.S. consumer reporting agencies), which is selling a credit scoring product competitive with the company’s products. Additional competitors include consumer reporting agencies outside the U.S. like CRIF Ratings, which operates in the European Union, and other data providers like LexisNexis and ChoicePoint, some of which also are the company’s partners.
For the company’s offerings that deliver credit scores, credit reports and consumer credit education solutions directly to consumers, the company competes with other direct to consumer credit and identity services such as Credit Karma, Credit Sesame, Experian and TransUnion, some of which are also the company’s partners.
Software
The competition in the company’s Software segment varies by application. In the fraud market for banking, the company competes primarily with Nice Actimize, Experian, Pegasystems, BAE Systems Applied Intelligence, SAS, ACI Worldwide, IBM, Feedzai and Featurespace. In the customer origination market, the company competes with Experian, Equifax, Moody’s, Meridian Link, and CGI, among others. In the customer management market, the company competes with Experian and SAS, among others. In the marketing services market, the company competes with Pegasystems, Equifax, Experian, SAS, Adobe and Salesforce, among others. In the decision platform market, the company competes with Pegasystems, IBM and SAS, among others.
Product Protection and Trademarks
As of September 30, 2024, the company held 198 U.S. and 29 foreign patents, with 75 applications pending.
As of September 30, 2024, the company had 24 trademarks registered in the U.S. and select foreign countries.
Governmental Regulation
As a provider of services to financial institutions, portions of the company’s business are subject to obligations to comply with certain GLBA (Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act) provisions, including limitations on the use or disclosure of the underlying data and rules relating to the technological, physical and administrative safeguarding of non-public personal information.
The company functions as a business associate for certain of the company’s customers that are HIPAA-covered entities and service providers, and in that context, the company is regulated as a business associate for the purposes of HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, as amended by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009).
The U.S. Fair Credit Reporting Act (the ‘FCRA’) applies to consumer reporting agencies, as well as data furnishers, and users of consumer reports such as banks and other companies, many of which are the company’s customers.
There has been an increased focus on laws and regulations related to the company’s business and the business of the company’s customers, including by the U.S. regulators such as the CFPB, relating to policy concerns regarding the operation of consumer reporting agencies, the use and accuracy of credit and alternative data, the costs of consumer reports and credit scores, the use of credit scores and fair lending, and the use, transparency, and fairness of algorithms, artificial intelligence, and machine learning in business processes.
The company is also subject to federal and state laws that are generally applicable to any U.S. business with national or international operations, such as antitrust laws, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, state unfair or deceptive practices acts and various employment laws.
History
The company, a Delaware corporation, was founded in 1956. It was incorporated in 1987. The company was formerly known as Fair Isaac & Company, Inc. and changed its name to Fair Isaac Corporation in 1992.
