The strategies will provide optimized offers with respect to lending amount and price for both existing and new customers. Ceska Sporitelna is the largest Czech retail bank and a subsidiary of Austria's Erste Bank Group.

One major focus for Ceska is the optimization of its "pre-approved loans" decision strategy for existing customers. This defines the best terms and conditions to offer each customer for a consumer loan, ensuring loan amounts and prices are balanced against customer preferences and portfolio objectives. Ceska plans to start testing the new strategy this summer.

"Innovation has always been an important driver for our success," said Petr Kapoun, head of risk at Ceska Sporitelna. "In retail banking we are the market leader, holding about 30 percent of market share in almost all major product segments. The new solution enables us to further strengthen this position by adapting offerings to meet our customers' individual needs. The FICO solution convinced us because it uses comprehensive simulations that show the effect of different strategies on KPIs, providing insights into the profit drivers of our portfolios."

The ability to simulate the effects of different decision strategies will enable Ceska to better balance take-up rates with risk and profit. To achieve this goal, FICO experts have built several decision models, and delivered optimized strategies and training to the internal analytics team on FICO® Decision Optimizer, the tool the bank has also chosen for future optimization projects. This powerful, flexible, easy-to-use software provides an offline scenario analysis and optimization environment that can quickly output decision strategies ready for implementation into the bank's existing systems. As FICO Decision Optimizer supports the whole customer lifecycle, Ceska Sporitelna will be looking to develop decision models for other products and decisions.

"The retail banking market in the Czech Republic has reached a new phase of maturity," said Phillip Sertel, who oversees FICO's operations in DACH, Central and Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. "This means that customer service, precise calculations and segmentation, and fine-tuned risk management are keys to success."

Fico Decision Optimizer is a business analyst tool that accelerates the creation of optimized decision strategies. Its models incorporate multiple scorecards, projections of potential actions and customer reactions, and multiple business objectives and constraints.