Analytic software firm FICO announced today that UK short-term lender Lending Stream has built its credit system using the FICO®Decision Management Suite, a platform for developing decision management applications. Lending Stream uses the system during the credit origination process to match credit terms with each applicant's specific risk and repayment ability.

"Analytics is in our DNA — we started as an analytics company and turned that expertise into becoming a leader in the alternative lending market," said Nallan Suresh, vice president for risk and analytics at Lending Stream. "We built our own underwriting engine, but we needed to move to a new platform that would allow us to scale our business quickly. We have a very strong IT team, and we could have built it ourselves, but FICO has built into its solution the best practices that come from decades of experience in building decision engines."

When Lending Stream surveyed the market, they chose FICO® Blaze Advisor® decision management system, part of the FICO Decision Management Suite.

"FICO Blaze Advisor offered us three things that others didn't," Suresh said. "First, we wanted a platform that would integrate very easily with our system, and allow people on our risk team to introduce new rules without going through a whole release process with our engineering team. That adds a lot of efficiency. Second, we wanted strong versioning, which is particularly important when working with both regulated businesses and large-scale portfolios. With the FICO system, we can go back and check the rules in place at any time, for any decision. Third, we wanted an engine that could help us scale rapidly, and this puts us miles ahead in the market – in online lending, it's all about the agility of the platform. With FICO Blaze Advisor, these features are time-tested."

Alternative lending is a highly competitive market in the UK. Lending Stream is using the FICO system to hone its offers.

"It's hard to underwrite loans in our space because so many customers have thin credit records, or blemished credit records, so we need really good underwriting," said Suresh. "Fortunately, we have one of the strongest analytics and underwriting teams in the industry. Everything we do is data-driven, so it's important to be able to introduce new scoring models into our system quickly. The FICO system will really cut down on the model deployment time — that's critical to being competitive in this space."

"For alternative lenders, it's absolutely critical to get an applicant's risk right, and to be able to change offers quickly as the market changes," said Steve Hadaway, general manager for FICO in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. "Lending Stream are taking an extremely advanced and dynamic approach to lending. Their team is excellent, and our software enables them to grow and change at their own pace."

The FICO® Decision Management Suite 2.0 provides an easy way for customers to evaluate, customize, deploy and scale state-of-the-art analytics and decision management solutions. It allows customers to quickly integrate FICO and FICO partner decision management tools and components with their own components, helping organizations of all sizes realize the promise of advanced analytics and decision management via cost-effective, scalable cloud and on-premises solutions.