FICO® DECISION MANAGEMENT SUITE

Powered by FICO® Blaze Advisor® decision rules management system

With FICO decision rules Drive smarter, precise and consistent decisions across
technologies, you can: the customer lifecycle, powered by your business users
Empower business users
Data-driven decisions are becoming strategically important
to create, maintain and
control business policies to a company’s success at every stage of the customer
and procedures lifecycle. Companies across all industries find that they have
Integrate analytics for rapid the data but struggle to make decisions that have meaningful
deployment of predictive business impact. A simple change of approach could make
models and scores
a big difference. Rather than start with data, digital-focused
Automate high-volume organizations are applying a decision-first approach that
operational decisions
begins with the business objective and decision model before
quickly and effectively to
improve business agility considering data and analytic requirements. Once the decision
Enable collaboration
has been identified, a company can access data in order to
to operationalize and gain customer insights and then act at the exact right moment.
institutionalize your The organization can then drive key decisions across all
decision strategies
interactions and continuously improve so the next decision
Connect decisions to is even more accurate.
transform, automate and
build stronger engagement

Improve the precision Using powerful rules technology to help digitize your
of decision-making with decisions
greater transparency and
stronger management of By putting the decision first with decision models, organizations are reducing
decision structure departmental siloes. Add cloud-based technology to the mix and companies can
also break down functional siloes. This is because platform technologies increase
the velocity of how businesses get all the necessary data and analytics into the
decisions, while essentially refocusing what individual team members do so they’re
more efficient. This enables organizations to operationalize their data and analytics,
driving smarter decisions and boosting automation.

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 FICO® DECISION MANAGEMENT SUITE
FICO Decision Technologies, powered by FICO® Blaze Advisor ®
®

It’s easy to see how a decision-first approach opens the door to realizing true digital
transformation. It’s true that there are many roadblocks to reaching this ideal state —
sometimes due to internal structures and sometimes due to the lack of technology
Key components of a
to assist in managing this kind of complexity. Many rules systems in the marketplace decision-first approach
don’t have the agility or flexibility to help businesses transform to this degree,
Making decisions across
and many decision management providers lack the understanding required to
an enterprise involves more
help companies evolve their organizational structure and technology solutions to
than using well-designed
meet the need.
software to analyze data.
FICO decision rules solutions It requires the creation of a
decision environment that
FICO helps businesses adopt a decision-first approach by offering FICO® Blaze
can be replicated in multiple
Advisor® decision rules management system and FICO® Decision Modeler.
situations. There are several
• Blaze Advisor is FICO’s flagship decision management product and the world’s key components involved in a
leading decision rules management system. Blaze Advisor provides companies decision-first approach:
with a scalable solution that delivers unprecedented agility and actionability for
smarter business decisions. • Analytics – Forward looking
or at the point of transaction
• Decision Modeler comes with the same core functionality as Blaze Advisor, but
instead of an on-premises installation, the technology is provided as a service in the • Scores – When making a
FICO® Analytic Cloud. The cloud allows for easier collaboration and accessibility credit risk decision
from multiple locations. And because it’s provided as a service, it is available
immediately, with no need for IT to install the system. As part of FICO® Decision • Compliance – Onboarding,
Management Suite, Decision Modeler integrates easily with FICO or open source monitoring, reporting, capital
analytics, optimization and data services. reserves

• Communication – Facilitate
FICO Decision Rules Solutions: the process or deliver the
Blaze Advisor and Decision Modeler decision

• Automation – Execution of
processes, business logic and
World’s leading decision FICO’s flagship product in the analytics
rules management system decision management space
• Explainability and
transparency – Track how
and why certain decisions
are made
Embedded in FICO® TRIAD® Customer Over 650 customers • Decision management –
Manager, FICO® Debt Manager™ around the world Automating and improving
solution and FICO® Origination Manager use Blaze Advisor operational decisions by
as the decisioning component
assessing impacts

8 of the top 10 9 of the top 10

EMEA banks use Blaze Advisor US banks use Blaze Advisor

© 2018 Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved. 2

 FICO® DECISION MANAGEMENT SUITE
FICO Decision Technologies, powered by FICO® Blaze Advisor ®
®

FICO decision rules: Effective across industries

INDUSTRY CLIENTS INCLUDE CLIENT SAMPLE

More than half of the

top 100 banks
Banking

Two thirds of the

top US P&C insurers
Insurance

One third of the

top US retailers
Retail/Consumer goods

8 of the top 10
pharma companies
Healthcare/Pharma

The most successful companies across regions and industries use FICO’s decision rules solutions to drive better business decisions.

Core benefits of FICO decision rules • Extend your decision precision using other tools within
solutions the FICO® Decision Management Suite, and third-party
tools. This integration of business rules with predictive
Both of our decision rules solutions, Blaze Advisor and Decision analytic models is a mainstay of decision management. In
Modeler, make decision modeling easy by providing a complete addition, Blaze Advisor supports Predictive Model Markup
environment for decision authoring, analysis and testing for Language (PMML) models. Models supported include neural
decision services. The technology addresses the following networks, linear and logistic regressions, decision trees and
business requirements: scorecards.
• Empower business users to create, maintain and control • Automate high-volume operational decisions quickly and
business policies and procedures. FICO’s intuitive visual effectively to improve business agility. The core decisioning
rule designers enable technical and non-technical people system needs to be robust, capable and agile whether
to author and maintain business logic outside of traditional creating simple rules for automation purposes or complex
code, making rule updates quick and easy in a seamless rules embedded in trees and scorecards. Organizations can
and scalable architecture. The improved business agility drive smarter business decisions faster with the unparalleled
helps organizations realize order-of-magnitude acceleration control, speed, accuracy, consistency and transparency
in decision cycle times, such as changing pricing and new of their business logic — which is particularly critical in
account processing. Tasks that formerly took days are now responding to changing business, economic and regulatory
being performed in minutes. This speed to deploy new conditions.
strategies and predictive models helps companies respond
rapidly to internal or external policy changes and expedites • Boost collaboration to operationalize and institutionalize
decision time-to-market. your decision strategies. FICO’s rules technology empowers
business analysts and policy managers to develop and

© 2018 Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved. 3

 FICO® DECISION MANAGEMENT SUITE
FICO Decision Technologies, powered by FICO® Blaze Advisor ®
®

maintain the decision logic themselves with an easy-to-use, increase decision efficiency and precision across the entire
low-code interface. These groups can work collaboratively customer lifecycle — essentially, centralize their decisions.
by sharing and reusing rules, rulesets, ruleflows, object
• Improve the precision of decision-making with greater
models and other decision assets. This enables experts to
transparency and stronger management of decision
be more connected to the decision and work together to find
structure. Both FICO® Blaze Advisor decision rules
the best strategy.
management system and FICO® Decision Modeler provide a
• Connect decisions to transform, automate and build complete history and audit log of all changes to rules, helping
stronger engagement. FICO decision tools help companies with regulatory requirements and decision accountability.
drive enterprise-wide consistency in decision-making. By Decision impact analysis gives companies an assessment of
reusing decision models and decision logic, companies can the potential impacts of a particular change in the logic.

“decision
FICO really mentored us through this overhaul of our
system. With their strong partnership and
commitment to this project, we were able to develop
and implement our new decision strategies with 30%
time savings and at 25% cost savings.
”
Dawid VanZyl, Programme Executive Credit Decisioning at African Bank

Client:
African Bank

Challenges:
• Replace disconnected, custom solutions across the credit lifecycle with
a centralized, flexible decision system
• Reduce long strategy modification cycles
Centralized Decision Engine
• Drive transparency and collaboration

Strategy Accelerates Profits • Boost operational efficiency and profitability

Solution:
• FICO® Blaze Advisor® decision rules management system
• Decision Implementation Accelerator

Results:
• Stunning transformation from projected loss to $6.5 million profit in <6 months
• Implement new scoring strategies in just one week
• Reduce expected costs by 25% (50% faster go-lives, reduced testing times)
• Reduce time to make changes from two months to two days
• Train internal team quickly with FICO collaboration and knowledge transfer
• Champion/challenger testing enabled in Credit Risk, Profiling,
Product Specification and Offer Strategy
© 2018 Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved. 4
 FICO® DECISION MANAGEMENT SUITE
FICO Decision Technologies, powered by FICO® Blaze Advisor ®
®

“make
Working with FICO helps us
better credit decisions and
automate a lot of our manual
processes, therefore bringing a
better customer experience.
Ravi Shah, Senior Vice President
”
for Enterprise, Architecture and Strategy
at Worldpay

Client:
Worldpay (formerly Vantiv)

Challenges:

• Faster/instant onboarding
Merchant Onboarding • Align compliance and speed

System for 40 Billion • Reduce decision siloes

Solution:
Payments per Year
• FICO® Decision Management Suite, including:

(#1 Global Acquirer) • FICO® Decision Modeler

• FICO® Application Studio

• FICO® Data Orchestrator

Results:

• Rules-based platform: Scaled across verticals, product lines and regions

• Automate applications: Cut decision time from days to minutes, keep merchants
happy and reduce costs (51% automation: 5x improvement)

• Increase accuracy: Reduce portfolio risk, cut costs and minimize fraud

• Increase speed: Better customer experience, accelerate business growth

• Streamline rule and strategy development: Quickly adapt to market

or regulatory changes

• Easy third-party vendor integration: Compliance/Know Your Customer/

Credit/Fraud

© 2018 Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved. 5

 FICO® DECISION MANAGEMENT SUITE
FICO Decision Technologies, powered by FICO® Blaze Advisor ®
®

Extend the power of decision models

As components of the FICO® Decision Management Suite, FICO® Blaze Advisor decision rules management system and FICO®
Decision Modeler integrate easily with other FICO solutions or other components of the suite. This gives companies access to a
complete decisioning cycle that leverages data, analytics, decision rules and optimization to help ensure the best decisions. It is
also a cost-effective and easy way to evaluate, customize, deploy and scale state-of-the-art decision management solutions.

Anatomy of FICO Decision Rules Solutions

MANAGE STRUCTURE DEPLOYMENT

Decision areas Decision services

Advanced
analytics
Simple web-based
interface for business users
Repository
Java

.NET
$
Desktop power tools and APIs Credit risk Pricing
assessment + COBOL
Offer
management

Business rules are configured, tested and managed from either the desktop or a simple web-based interface that enables users to see, understand
and edit the business rules without writing any code. The rules repository stores rules and manages rule changes for all decision areas. Rules can
be deployed and executed via the cloud or on your own server.

Core capabilities of FICO decision rules Architecture: Application developers can use
solutions architectures that separate
the decision logic from
the application control logic. The logic that represents
In addition to the significant benefits of having decision rules business decisions can be maintained independently of
technologies automate and power your decisions, Blaze the application
code and can be updated without stopping
Advisor and Decision Modeler offer numerous features to make and restarting the applications. The rules in these
it easier for business users to define, execute and manage the decisions can be reviewed and understood by business
decisions that run your business. Key features include: analysts. Separating the decision logic from procedural
Safety and security: Business analysts can maintain code also allows faster development of the decision logic.
decision logic used in IT systems safely and securely Shared logic: Decision logic can be shared across
without being dependent on technical resources. This applications, promoting consistent behavior throughout
reduces application modification time and speeds the enterprise. This becomes more important as
organizational response to changing conditions. It can organizations offer services over multiple channels, such
also significantly reduce the total cost of ownership for as web self-service, call center and mobile access.
the application over time.

© 2018 Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved. 6

 FICO® DECISION MANAGEMENT SUITE
FICO Decision Technologies, powered by FICO® Blaze Advisor ®
®

Decision rules: Decision rules can be defined, reviewed variety of sources, including multiple databases, XML
and maintained using a variety of different formats, such documents, Java objects, .NET/COM objects and
as decision tables, decision trees, scorecards, decision COBOL copybooks.
graphs and customized templates. This means that
Decision testing and explanation: Analyze business
any set of rules can be displayed in the most practical
impact before deployment by simulating the effect of new
and natural way, allowing a clear understanding of
or updated strategies. Use actual rule results to estimate
their purpose and interrelationship, even in a multi-step
outcomes and identify opportunities for improvement,
decision process.
and include simulation results within the approval process
Data access: Businesses can make automated to reduce time to production.
decisions based on data accessed as needed from a

“undergoing
The amount of simplification and clarity that we have now achieved by

”
the Decision Requirements Analysis process is just staggering.
Mortgage Risk Analyst at Large African Bank

Successful implementations using Decision Requirements Analysis consists

the proven Decision Requirements of a standard sequence of stages:
Analysis approach • Identify the decision points within the business
FICO developed the Decision Requirements Analysis process flow
approach as a way to help companies create a • Decompose the decisions in a graphical fashion and
standards-based decision implementation practice. derive relevant design documents such as the Decision
This decision methodology allows the functional Requirements Documents and Data Harvesting
requirements for the decision services to be defined Workbook that underpin a successful implementation
in detail, and exposes the knowledge and data
sources required. It provides the structural information • Break larger decision processes into manageable
to support decisions. With this methodology, projects using the created Decision Requirement
organizations can understand how to approach certain Diagrams
decision scenarios, as well as get strategies configured
and defined in a decision rules system.

Are you ready to implement a decision-first approach in your organization?

Visit www.fico.com/blaze to download a free trial and get started today.

FOR MORE INFORMATION NORTH AMERICA LATIN AMERICA & CARIBBEAN EUROPE, MIDDLE EAST & AFRICA ASIA PACIFIC
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FICO, Blaze Advisor, TRIAD, and Debt Manager are trademarks or registered trademarks of Fair Isaac Corporation in the United States and in other countries. Other product and company names herein may be
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