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Fair Isaac improves Blaze Advisor rules management with new features for score model creation and execution

Release 5.5 adds scorecards and operations on sets of data, enabling users to more quickly and easily create and modify automated decision processes

MINNEAPOLIS, MN, June 7, 2004 -- Fair Isaac Corporation (NYSE:FIC), the leading provider of analytics and decision technology, today announced release 5.5 of Blaze Advisor rules management technology. Fair Isaac Blaze Advisor is an industry-leading software package that allows design, deployment, execution, and maintenance of business rules as part of an automated business application. The new release adds Fair Isaac's established scorecard modeling capabilities to the product, along with support for rule tests against data set statistics. The additional features allow customers to more quickly and easily create and modify powerful automated decision processes.

Blaze Advisor 5.5 gives users the ability to define and execute scorecards within a rules-based decision process. A scorecard gives companies an easy way to combine many factors into an overall measurement that can be used to drive their decisioning rules. By assigning proprietary categories, ranges, and associated scores to individual criteria, organizations can build up additive scores that predict rankings such as a customer's relative worth, a prospect's likelihood to accept a promotional offer, or a mechanical component's probability of failing within a given configuration.

For companies in sectors such as finance, insurance, government, or other highly-regulated disciplines, the product offers ways to set, capture, and record significant factors used in calculating a score. By defining customized Reason Codes, organizations can make use of scorecards as an auditable component of their decision processes. Contributing factors to a score can be tracked and reported based on relative corporate priorities or on mathematical rankings considering each factor's impact on the result.

"Fair Isaac has decades of experience in working with scores as a part of decision processes," said Todd Davis, vice president of Enterprise Decision Management software at Fair Isaac. "We were able to include tested and proven interfaces and functionality when adding scorecard definition and execution to Blaze Advisor 5.5. Our customers can now benefit from the widest range of rule interfaces available, with decision trees, tables, scorecards, and configurable templates all available to developers and to non-technical business users, allowing rule maintenance through automatically generated Web pages."

Another enhancement in release 5.5 is the ability to test values in rule conditions against calculated statistics from a set of data. As an example of this functionality, a school working with a collection of student test scores could write rules to directly test an individual score against the average, maximum, or minimum of the entire set -- without requiring the rule author to write a calculation loop or explicit function to find those statistics. The new capability speeds development, makes maintenance of rules easier, and brings additional power to rules for use in sophisticated application scenarios.

The new release also adds support for the latest versions of Java application servers from Oracle and JBoss, with provision for using the popular Apache Ant facility for building custom deployment files. Customers working with Fair Isaac's unique graphical decision trees as a part of their rule-based systems now benefit from an enhanced user interface that makes navigating large and complex trees more intuitive. Customers will also see performance improvements when working with Blaze Advisor's Web-based rule maintenance applications, which allow non-technical business experts to manage rules, tables, trees, and scorecards without programming.

Fair Isaac Blaze Advisor has been listed as a Leader in Gartner's Business Rule Engine Magic Quadrants for the past two years. Gartner defines Leaders as vendors who are performing well today, have a clear vision of market direction and are actively building competencies to sustain their leadership position in the market. With hundreds of customers worldwide, including Capital One, Ford Motor Company, Hewlett Packard, Verizon Wireless, and New York Life, Blaze Advisor has been first to market with major business rule innovations such as ruleflows, decision trees, scorecards, versioning, graphical editing environments, and Web-based rule maintenance for business managers.

Blaze Advisor is part of Fair Isaac's software and solutions for enterprise decision management, which combines data analytics, modeling, and policy-level control to let companies define and manage their automated business systems for improved efficiency and greater profitability. Fair Isaac offers customers a combination of software and services allowing an enterprise to quickly implement customized systems that lower operational costs, reduce risk, and provide greater accuracy and consistency of critical business decisions in interactive and batch applications.

About Fair Isaac

Fair Isaac Corporation (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 billions of mission-critical customer decisions each 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. For more information on Fair Isaac Blaze Advisor, visit www.fairisaac.com/rules.

Statement Concerning Forward-Looking Information

Except for historical information contained herein, the statements contained in this press release that relate to Fair Isaac, including statements regarding its Fair Isaac Blaze Advisor 5.5. product offering and the benefits to be derived from this offering, 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 offering, the risks that customers will not perceive material benefits from the offering, failure of the product to deliver the expected results, the possibility of errors or defects in the offering, regulatory 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 30, 2003, and quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the period ended March 31, 2004. Forward-looking statements should be considered with caution. 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 and FICO are trademarks or registered trademarks of Fair Isaac Corporation, in the United States and/or in other countries. Other product and company names herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.



Fair Isaac Corporation
Angela Carlson, 415-492-5373
acarlson@fairisaac.com  

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