These patents were awarded to team members of FICO Labs for inventions underlying the company's solutions in fraud protection, cybersecurity, predictive analytics and decision management.

Ten of the latest patents cover analytic innovations used by FICO's industry-leading fraud solutions across the financial, healthcare and telecommunications industries. These technologies, many of which are used in the FICO® Falcon® Platform, help improve fraud detection, reduce false positives and improve the customer experience.

FICO's fraud team patented a real-time score related to probability that a computer used in an online commercial transaction is associated with past online transactions for that client, utilising network behaviors between a webserver and a client computer.

FICO also received a patent for a consumer-driven secure sockets layer (SSL) modulator. This is a software system and method for executing secure commercial transactions online by enabling unique receipt message encryption to thwart "man-in-the-middle" attacks.

Another patented system automatically creates variables for so-called adaptive models in real-time and in the production environment, which improves fraud models' ability to detect fraudulent transactions more effectively in uncertain conditions.

An invention for maintaining a pre-defined fixed score distribution enables improved fraud detection. FICO® Falcon® Fraud Manager uses this technology to adjust score distributions impacted by changes in fraud rates/patterns, spending patterns and macro-economic changes in card usage, and holiday pattern score shifts.

Two inventions improve fraud detection in health care. FICO patented an invention for analysis of payment coding methodologies to identify potential fraud at multiple levels of hierarchical coded payment systems, including the prospective payment system used in Medicare. Another invention, incorporated in FICO® Insuranceance Fraud Manager, identifies unusual groupings of services performed either on a single patient or provided by a single provider to many patients.

"FICO has been the innovator in payments fraud for more than 20 years," said TJ Horan, who manages FICO's fraud solutions. "Our team's inventions are expanding our ability to defeat fraud in multiple industries, and improve cybersecurity for every consumer who transacts online."

FICO was also awarded patents for inventions related to predictive analytics. FICO scientists patented an invention that predicts which mortgage borrowers are most likely to strategically default on their loan. This methodology is at the core of the FICO® Strategic Default Custom Analytic. Another patented technique can be used to estimate a portfolio-level effect of economic conditions on a portfolio of accounts. This technique is used in the FICO® Economic Impact Service.

Two more analytics inventions allow organisations to use remote data sources to provide partial scores to a decisioning system, and to build a robust predictive solution when only limited historical data is available.

Additional patents were awarded for inventions in decision management. These include a causal modeling approach for estimating the potential future outcomes that would result from multiple decision alternatives, which improves lenders' ability to make lending-related decisions. Another invention improves automated decision-making by improving a system's ability to adapt to new variables and make decisions between available alternatives.

FICO's team also patented an analytic innovation that helps select the appropriate product to offer a customer based on customer data, and an invention that assesses the value of a customer and recommends an appropriate customer action.

On the technical side, FICO's data scientists received a patent for a set of techniques for drawing curved edges in graphs, which improves data visualisation.

"FICO continues to invent groundbreaking techniques and approaches that improve our ability to quickly and accurately analyse Big Data to improve decisions," said Dr. Andrew Jennings, chief analytics officer at FICO and head of FICO Labs. "Our latest patents represent innovations in a broad range of analytic disciplines that are delivering real-world results."

In addition to the new patents described above, the company now holds 11 patents for entity resolution and social network analysis from its April 2013 acquisition of Infoglide Software. FICO has another 85 patent applications pending in the United States and other countries.