Global analytics software provider FICO announced today a partnership agreement with Israel’s Open-Finance.ai, a risk, finance and compliance software enabler of open banking and finance services and consulting firm headquartered in Tel Aviv. Through this agreement, Open-Finance.ai will integrate the FICO® Blaze Advisor® decision rules management system into its open banking platform. This fully automated, instant lending experience will allow lenders to move away from manual and time-consuming credit assessment methods and embrace real-time, analytically driven appraisals.  

With the advent of open banking data in Israel, this integrated technology from FICO and Open-Finance.ai will help remove human bias from lending decisions, improve risk decisions and expand credit to more people. 

“Israel is on the cusp of major banking reform with the introduction of open banking,” said Mark Farmer, vice president of Partner Management for FICO in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. “Automating decisions allows lenders to increase the efficiency of the lending process without sacrificing risk management regulatory rigour. This will speed up lending, increase customer satisfaction, reduce operational costs and drive economic activity.” 

“Israel’s new open banking measures are an exciting opportunity to promote innovation and effective competition in the market,” said Itzik Gini, co-founder at Open-Finance.ai.  

“Manual processes, a conservative approach and significant regulation have been a drag on the growth of the Israeli market,” said Shay Basson, co-Founder at Open-Finance.ai. Now, we have the ability to manage risk instantly, based on multiple data sources to provide an instant, yet risk-aware decision to credit and insurance consumers. To unlock this potential, we knew we wanted to work with FICO due to its global leadership position in decision management technology.” 

As FICO’s flagship rules authoring solution and the world’s leading decision rules management system, FICO® Blaze Advisor® enables organizations to maximize control over high-volume operational decisions. Blaze Advisor provides businesses, across multiple industries, with a scalable solution that delivers unprecedented agility and actionability for smarter, transparent, and more consistent business decisions. Blaze Advisor empowers business users with multiple methods for rule authoring, testing, deployment, and management.