24 January 2001 (San Rafael, California, USA) — Building on its deep expertise in solving real-world analytic business problems, Fair, Isaac and Company, Inc. (NYSE:FIC) today announced the availability of its next generation decision engine technology — Fair, Isaac Decision System™ 3.0 — and accompanying analytic design tool — Strategy Designer™.
Fair, Isaac Decision System is a powerful system that allows businesses to quickly design and implement analytically driven decision engines that can be executed in real time to consistently and automatically make decisions that lead to improved business performance. Decision System allows business users to author decision logic and embed it within their business applications to provide them with the "intelligence inside" those applications.
Tom Grudnowski, Fair, Isaac's president and CEO said, "For the first time, we are unbundling our proprietary decision technology from the predictive software applications Fair, Isaac traditionally sells. Decision System can be used by analysts in any industry to build, automate and improve a wide range of business applications that require complex decisions based on ever-increasing amounts of data." Decision System 3.0 is generally available now and is already currently in use by a number of leading companies in the U.S., Europe and Japan. Decision engines created using Decision System can be deployed across the enterprise, on mainframe, AS/400, Unix and Windows NT platforms. In this way, an enterprise can house their business strategies in a common architecture regardless of target applications or execution environments.
Grudnowski said that Decision System 3.0 also forms the basis for significant improvements in Fair, Isaac's existing application offerings. "Decision engines created using Decision System will be embedded into Fair, Isaac's complete business solutions, including LiquidCredit™, ClickPremium™ and Fair, Isaac MarketSmart Decision System™, to offer the next generation in predictive power and decisioning capabilities, " Grudnowski stated.
In addition, components of Decision System are being embedded within the company's account management solution, TRIAD™, and will be leveraged in the next release of StrategyWare™, the company's account origination decision software.
Scott Lascelles, Loyalty Marketing Group Vice President of NextCard, said recently: "Decision System is proving to be a critical platform component in helping us implement strategies for credit line increases and balance transfer promotions. This application supports our very sophisticated, complex business logic and allows us to execute and change our strategies for targeting and marketing."
Grudnowski explained that the company's 15+ years experience in building decision engines continues to evolve and improve. "Businesses in all industries are recognizing the profound benefits of automated, targeted decisions in marketing, new account acquisition and customer management. We're not only keeping pace with the market needs, we are now offering the most powerful, sophisticated decision tools available."
The new 3.0 release certifies its use on Microsoft's Windows 2000 platform and includes a new Model Editor component that allows scoring models to be imported and maintained using a graphical user interface. This version marks the first step in Web-enabling the entire decision software platform.
To assist businesses with the creation of strategies that result in more powerful decisions, Fair, Isaac has also made available Strategy Designer. Strategy Designer is an easy-to-use and flexible tool that enables analytic business users to quickly create complex strategies for use in decision engines. With Strategy Designer, businesses can utilize one of their increasingly valuable assets, their data, to interactively create more effective business strategies. Strategy Designer, which is seamlessly integrated with Decision System, is available now and is currently in use by a number of leading companies. As with Decision System, Strategy Designer will be leveraged with other Fair, Isaac solutions.
In order to make the right data-driven decisions, analysts expect that U.S. businesses will increase their spending on related technologies nearly 300 percent — to $17 billion — by 2004. Forrester Research reported recently that the current business intelligence technologies are fundamentally inadequate due to their "inability to uncover unanticipated insights — leaving significant business value untapped."
Together, Fair, Isaac's Decision System and Strategy Designer effectively address this critical new market need through data-driven strategy development and execution solutions that provide the missing link between data warehousing and business process. Decision System and Strategy Designer allow for data-driven results and expert judgment to be applied to the creation and operation of automated decision engines — a critical enhancement to the data mining and other advanced decisioning methodologies that are currently available. Business users, rather than programmers, can then rapidly design, test, implement and modify complex rules and policies that are consistently applied across large numbers of business transactions.
About Fair, Isaac
Fair, Isaac and Company is a global provider of customer analytics and decision technology. Widely recognized for its pioneering work in credit scoring, Fair, Isaac revolutionized the way lending decisions are made. Today the company helps clients in multiple industries increase the value of customer relationships. Fair, Isaac has made the Forbes list of the top 200 U.S. small companies eight times in the last nine years, and was named by InformationWeek as one of the top 50 application service providers. Headquartered in San Rafael, California, Fair, Isaac has 21 offices worldwide.
Some of the information contained in this press release, including statements with respect to the expected availability and industry adoption of the newly released products, are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the "safe harbor" provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially, including the company's ability to recruit and maintain key technical and managerial personnel, the maintenance of its existing relationships with key alliance partners, its ability to continue to develop new and enhanced products and services, competition, regulation changes applicable to the use of consumer credit and other data and other risks described from time to time in Fair, Isaac's SEC reports, including its Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended September 2000. These forward-looking statements speak only as of the date hereof. Fair, Isaac disclaims any intent or obligation to update these forward-looking statements.