Designed explicitly for the challenges of today's tighter credit and regulatory environment, Origination Manager is FICO's most powerful solution yet for assessing customer risk and potential value at the origination stage.

Lenders today are challenged to find profitable customers they can approve with confidence while avoiding risks of delinquencies and fraud. New regulations further constrain customer treatment after credit has been granted, making the right origination decision especially critical. FICO Origination Manager includes decision optimisation tools to more precisely match offers to applicants in terms of products, line amounts and pricing. It also integrates with a variety of proprietary and third-party data and models, including new FICO solutions that provide measures of consumer credit capacity and the impact of economic changes on consumer credit risk. Furthermore, FICO Origination Manager enables lenders to connect origination decisions at the customer level, which results in more relevant offers, higher customer satisfaction, improved retention, and lower marketing and acquisition costs.

"Our clients need to manage risk, but in this environment they're also striving to find elusive pockets of profitability they may be missing," said Mike Gordon, vice president and head of FICO's banking practice. "FICO Origination Manager helps ensure that customers who have responded to an offer are appropriately reviewed for both risk and fraud, and then matched with the terms that best ensure the highest long-term profitability for the institution."

In a dynamic regulatory climate, banks also need to be able to adjust their decision strategies quickly. FICO Origination Manager is designed to make it easy for business users to create, test, modify and deploy strategies, enabling them to respond rapidly to changing conditions. It is built on an SOA with user-configurable systems, and uses the industry-leading FICOTM Blaze Advisor® business rules management system, which means greater flexibility and reduced cycle times for launching new strategies and rules.

"FICO Origination Manager's modular design means lenders can deploy the application processing services that best fit their current or future plans," said Deborah Kerr, executive vice president of FICO's Product and Technology Organisation. "It's designed to support a full spectrum of needs, whether you're a sophisticated global lending institution looking to fine-tune the decisioning steps within your existing infrastructure, or a smaller regional bank needing a more holistic solution for underwriting new accounts."

FICO Origination Manager is built on FICO's Decision Management architecture, as are FICO's applications for credit fraud (FICOTM Falcon Fraud Manager), customer management (FICO TRIAD Customer Manager) and collections (FICO Debt Manager). The use of FICO Blaze Advisor business rules management system, a common data model and other common features allows lenders to easily connect decisions across the customer lifecycle, to improve origination decisions based on downstream fraud and collections activity. Also, the use of FICO Blaze Advisor and FICOTM Model Builder makes it easy to develop and deploy models faster and rapidly apply new scores within FICO Origination Manager.

"As lenders emerge from the financial crisis, they are starting to shift their focus from primarily loss prevention to responsible, profitable growth," said Craig Focardi, senior research director at TowerGroup. "Add in changes in regulation that constrain post-origination treatments and lenders have a very delicate balancing act between customer preferences, fraud risk assessment, and regulatory constraints. Banks need advanced tools that can help them optimise decisions at the most critical decision point - the one at which the customer is either approved or declined, and the terms are set."