SAO PAULO, July 26, 2017 /PRNewswire/ --

• Honduras-based Banco Ficohsa has increased sales for its extra cash product by $21 million per year, and increased profit with its credit line optimization strategy by 50 percent per account, using FICO technology.
• The solution also dramatically improved business operations, including reduced time to market – months to days, and reduced IT involvement from 100 percent of projects to just 5 percent.
• Banco Ficohsa is now a top ten bank in Central America, servicing 450,000 customer accounts across four countries.

Leading Central American bank Banco Ficohsa has seen significant growth, regional expansion, and increased business efficiency since deploying FICO® Blaze Advisor® decision rules management system in 2011. The system enabled the bank to increase sales by $21 million per year, while also reducing IT involvement from 100 percent to 5 percent of projects. The bank has also used FICO® Decision Optimizer to increase the profitability of accounts by 50 percent.

"FICO's decision management technology delivered the unprecedented agility that we needed to grow our business," said Zadik Lopez, regional analytics manager, Banco Ficohsa. "With Blaze Advisor, we can now quickly implement and adjust interest rates, line assignments, loan amounts, line increases, and line decreases for different segments in several countries at the same time. Those decisions and policies were once managed manually and would take up to six months to change."

Banco Ficohsa, which started as a small corporate bank in Honduras, partnered with FICO to be more consistent and segmented with its implementation of strategies in originations and account management. It quickly became the largest bank in Honduras and was able to expand to Guatemala, Panama, and Nicaragua within five years. Its portfolio has grown from 10,000 to 450,000 customer accounts, spanning all four countries.

When Banco Ficohsa acquired Citibank's consumer banking business in Honduras in 2014, it used Blaze Advisor to set the rules and merge the strategies from Citibank into its own system. Because of the ease of implementation, it took Banco Ficohsa only a month and a half to migrate the decision rules and complete the transition of the largest acquisition ever by a Honduran bank.

The bank uses FICO® Decision Optimizer to analytically optimize its lending decision strategies. "We have been aggressive with our use of analytics to make our portfolio more efficient," Lopez said. "We experienced a tremendous gain by using decision rules and we believe that optimization will take us even further."

"Banco Ficohsa has used advanced analytics and decision management technology to fuel rapid growth," said Alexandre Graff, FICO vice president and general manager for Latin America. "They have demonstrated how to combine automation and analytics to scale the business, lower costs and win customers."

FICO® Blaze Advisor® is the world's leading decision rules management system, maximizing control over high-volume operational decisions. Blaze Advisor provides companies with a scalable solution that delivers actionable insights for smarter business decisions regardless of the business challenge. FICO Blaze Advisor and FICO Decision Optimizer are tools offered as part of the FICO® Decision Management Suite.

About FICO

FICO (NYSE: FICO) powers decisions that help people and businesses around the world prosper. Founded in 1956 and based in Silicon Valley, the company is a pioneer in the use of predictive analytics and data science to improve operational decisions. FICO holds more than 170 US and foreign patents on technologies that increase profitability, customer satisfaction and growth for businesses in financial services, telecommunications, health care, retail and many other industries. Using FICO solutions, businesses in more than 100 countries do everything from protecting 2.6 billion payment cards from fraud, to helping people get credit, to ensuring that millions of airplanes and rental cars are in the right place at the right time.

Learn more at http://www.fico.com

FICO and Blaze Advisor are registered trademarks of Fair Isaac Corporation in the United States and in other countries.

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SOURCE FICO