Drexel University’s LeBow College of Business and CIO.com have named Dr. Scott Zoldi, chief analytics officer at analytic software firm FICO, one of the winners of the first Analytics 50 Awards. The awards program honors 50 executives who are using analytics at their organisations to solve business challenges.

Dr. Zoldi received the award for his leadership in developing new analytic technologies to reduce payment card fraud, by detecting rapidly changing criminal methods. Dr. Zoldi led the development of a patented adaptive analytics technology and multilayered self-calibrating analytics, deployed in the company’s FICO^® Falcon^® Platform, which protects 2.6 billion payment cards worldwide. This solution can leverage a client’s fraud experience in near real-time to adjust model weights, without the need for time-consuming off-line training. FICO also created a patented technology called behaviour-sorted lists, which identifies an individual cardholder’s specific spending patterns at preferred merchants and individualised transaction patterns.

By adding adaptive analytics, one large U.S debit card issuer realised an 18 percent improvement in real-time fraud dollars detected, and a relative reduction of 11 percent in account false positive ratio, saving millions of dollars per year and improving the customer experience for its cardholders. One international card issuer has experienced a 17 percent reduction in false-positive cases with no negative impact on real-time fraud dollars detection rate. For transactions that occur at a cardholder’s favorite merchants, bank clients have seen a reduction in false-positive occurrences of 35-50 percent, contributing to significant increases in customer satisfaction.

“These pioneering analytics have enabled card issuers and payment processors around the globe to combat the evolving barrage of payment card fraud attacks,” Dr. Zoldi said. “I am honored that Drexel University’s’ LeBow College of Business and CIO.com have recognised me, my team and FICO for our work to improve the security of the global payments infrastructure.”

“With the ever-growing threat of data breaches and identify theft, predictive solutions such as FICO’s use of adaptive analytics are exactly the types of innovate safeguards needed to protect the consumer," said Murugan Anandarajan, PhD, Department Head of Decision Sciences and MIS at Drexel University.

The Analytics 50 winners represent a broad spectrum of industries, ranging from pharmaceuticals and healthcare to sports and media. The Analytics 50 is a collaboration between Drexel University’s LeBow College of Business and CIO.com to recognise 50 companies using analytics to solve business challenges. Winners were selected by a panel of leaders in academia and industry who judged nominations based on the submitted challenge, the innovativeness of the analytics solution, and the overall impact on the organisation. Honorees will be recognised at an awards ceremony on November 9, 2016 at Drexel University’s LeBow College of Business in Philadelphia.