New Fair, Isaac Business Science Suite Delivers Complete Set Of Decision Management Software Tools

Powerful Architecture Empowers Organizations To Rapidly Develop And Deploy Analytics-Driven Decision Strategies

SAN RAFAEL, Calif., Oct. 21, 2002 -- Fair, Isaac and Company, Incorporated (NYSE:FIC) today introduced Fair, Isaac Business Science(TM) suite, a complete set of software tools that allow organizations to develop and deploy solutions incorporating critical decision strategies. A result of synergies created by the recent merger of Fair, Isaac and HNC Software Inc., Business Science integrates the combined company's standard-setting decision management technologies and makes them available to custom application developers.

Business Science is designed to help businesses achieve an unprecedented level of control over how important decisions are made and implemented at every level of the organization, from the executive suite to the front lines of IT. It brings together proven analytic technologies used to make billions of intelligent decisions every day by Fair, Isaac customers across many industries including financial services, government, healthcare, insurance, manufacturing, and telecommunications. With Business Science, companies can take advantage of their unique experiences and business insights to improve future decisions, target products and services to better meet customer needs, and respond rapidly to changing business conditions.

The introduction of Fair, Isaac's new product suite corresponds with growing industry interest in the area of Enterprise Decision Management, or EDM. Enterprise Decision Management refers to the ways that organizations model, analyze and drive business processes based on data, business policies and desired outcomes. Business Science solutions allow organizations to create custom Enterprise Decision Management solutions for managing business decisions used within corporate software applications.

"Business Science introduces a new methodology and integrated tool kit that enables enterprises to define the network of data and processes required to automate their most important decisions, and ensure those decisions are consistently applied across the enterprise," said Tom Grudnowski, CEO of Fair, Isaac. "We have focused our nearly 50 years of experience in delivering equation-powered solutions on developing a custom decision management capability that can be implemented faster, better and more cost-effectively than ever before. The result is a combination of powerful and flexible tools that makes the world's leading decision management technologies accessible to more organizations and applicable to more business situations."

Business Science Software Components

Business Science consists of four integrated components that promote fast implementation and deployment of consistent decision strategies across the organization, while reducing costs and increasing productivity:

Model Builder is a predictive modeling tool that analyzes past data and business results, applying discovered historical relationships and patterns to new business transactions. The models that are developed through data analysis can be implemented as equations to understand historical data and predict future behavior. Other data-driven decisions may segment customers or transactions for targeted action. Analysis metrics and models are easily integrated with business rules and strategies to operationalize business insight and control.

Decision Optimizer provides a mathematical process for allocating resources to best achieve business objectives. Optimization is used to calculate the best possible utilization of resources such as people, time, processes, equipment, or supplies in order to achieve a desired result such as minimizing cost or maximizing throughput or profits. Optimization is needed when business decisions have a large number of variables, making it difficult to identify the most advantageous combination of actions. Optimization allows companies to incorporate constraints and desired outcomes into mathematical models to achieve the best possible results.

Decision Design and Deployment includes Blaze Advisor(TM) software, a business rules management tool that provides the ability to use expert judgment to implement and deploy business rules, and Blaze Decision System (TM) software, a data-driven business strategy deployment system. Business Science incorporates these components to make use of policies, practices and procedures in operational business decisions. Strategies are based on historical data and business acumen and can be tested via champion/challenger approaches to analyze results. Rule implementations may include segmentation, process flows, and decision trees to determine the proper response to a given business transaction.

Decision Framework provides an open Software Development Kit (SDK) that allows customers to quickly deploy end-to-end intelligent decisioning solutions through Fair, Isaac's Professional Services organization. Decision Framework supports deployment of solutions on a wide variety of implementation platforms, including Microsoft, IBM, Sun, HP, and Linux operating systems. In addition, it is specifically designed to allow customers and partners to develop high-performance, scalable decisioning applications on a J2EE/XML platform. Major Java application servers are supported for manufacturers such as BEA, Borland, HP, IBM, Oracle, and Sun.

Designed to Meet Diverse Needs

An overarching problem facing organizations today is how to develop and implement intelligent decisions in a fashion that respects and leverages the specific needs of different constituencies. Business Science allows business experts within the organization to utilize deep industry knowledge to define and shape policy, analysts to work with historical data to develop data-driven insights, business managers to make timely, optimal decisions, and IT to ensure effective deployment and running of applications that leverage the business knowledge.

Fair, Isaac Business Science accommodates the distinct differences between organizational disciplines by integrating tools with capabilities and interfaces to meet each group's unique requirements. It also provides both business and IT users with the tools they need to leverage their institutional knowledge, and effectively automate and implement better decisions in their automated systems.

"We believe that the building and integration of decision management solutions is the best way to help our customers achieve enterprise-wide value," said Grudnowski. "We have been delivering this type of value for years within the credit risk management and fraud solutions world. Now we can leverage this knowledge to help organizations plug powerful equations into existing IT infrastructure in order to automate the most important customer strategies across the enterprise. And, importantly, we can do this without disruption to the significant investments IT shops have already made in software infrastructure."

Strategic Product Portfolio

The launch of the Business Science suite complements Fair, Isaac's other core businesses: Strategy Machine(TM) units and Professional Services. These business units together provide a holistic approach for clients to solve critical business problems: Strategy Machine(TM) units for Fraud Analytics and Lifecycle Solutions deliver clients fully developed solutions tailored to solve specific business problems; the Professional Services unit serves clients in need of custom analytic solutions built by Fair, Isaac; and the new Enterprise Decision Tools unit supplies sophisticated and integrated decision tools for clients who choose to build their own applications. Fair, Isaac plans to base solutions across all of these units on the common Business Science architecture, facilitating easy and flexible integration among the solutions, and with clients' existing IT infrastructures.

"Fair, Isaac is already using these tools and core technologies to design complete applications for our customers," said Michael Chiappetta, Vice President of the Enterprise Decision Tools unit. "It makes strategic sense to offer them to our customers as a product offering at the same time. Customers can benefit from the increased focus on integration and development within these areas while Fair, Isaac expands its horizontal market growth and is able to devote additional resources to tool enhancement and refinement. This is a classic win-win for us as a software provider and for our customers with unique application needs."

More information on Business Science can be found at www.fairisaac.com/edm.

About Fair, Isaac

Fair, Isaac and Company (NYSE:FIC) is the preeminent provider of creative analytics that unlock value for people, businesses and industries. The company's predictive modeling, decision analysis, intelligence management, decision management systems and consulting services power more than 14 billion mission-critical customer decisions a year. Founded in 1956, Fair, Isaac helps thousands of companies in over 60 countries acquire customers more efficiently, increase customer value, reduce fraud and credit losses, lower operating expenses and enter new markets more profitably. Most leading banks and credit card issuers rely on Fair, Isaac solutions, as do insurers, retailers, telecommunications providers, healthcare organizations, and government agencies. Through the www.myfico.com Web site, consumers use the company's FICO(R) scores, the standard measure of credit risk, to manage their financial health. As of August 5, 2002, HNC Software Inc., a leading provider of high-end analytic and decision management software, is part of Fair, Isaac. For more information, visit www.fairisaac.com.

Forward-Looking Statement

Except for historical information contained herein, the statements contained in this press release that relate to Fair, Isaac, including statements regarding its Business Science suite, its components, or other products, and the benefits to be derived from any of the foregoing, 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 any unforeseen technical difficulties related to the implementation use and functionality of the offerings, market acceptance of the offerings, the risks that customers will not perceive material benefits from the offerings, failure of the products to deliver the expected results, the possibility of errors or defects in the offerings, the company's ability to recruit and retain key technical and managerial personnel, the maintenance of its existing relationships with key alliance partners, competition, regulatory changes applicable to the use of consumer credit and other data, a lengthy sales cycle for our products, 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 30, 2001, and Form 10-Q for the period ended June 30, 2002. If any of these risks or uncertainties materializes or any of these assumptions proves incorrect, Fair, Isaac's results could differ materially from Fair, Isaac's expectations in these statements. Fair, Isaac disclaims any intent or obligation to update these forward-looking statements.

Fair, Isaac, Business Science, Blaze Advisor, Blaze Decision System, Strategy Machine, FICO and HNC are trademarks or registered trademarks of Fair, Isaac and Company, Incorporated, in the United States and/or in other countries. Other product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.


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