The new African Bank, which underwent a restructuring and reopened in 2016, uses FICO decision management software as the central decision-making hub of the bank. This new technology from FICO is said to bring more efficiency, governance and collaboration to the way the bank makes decisions.

The bank's transformation included an extensive review of bank operations, which showed that the existing decision-making processes created inefficiencies and missed opportunities for reacting to the market.

"We had the entire bank look at all existing logic going into our decision-making process, which was fragmented over different applications and teams," said Dawid Van Zyl, program executive credit decisioning at African Bank, who led the team tasked with finding optimal ways to run the business.

The team chose FICO® Blaze Advisor® decision rules management system as the hub for all decision-making. After a short implementation period, African Bank is now using Blaze Advisor for decision services in four major modules, with 11 bespoke environments within those modules. The bank is able to manage all of this with a single easy-to-use interface, and now has full lifecycle control over the entire system.

"Once we started solving difficult scenarios with Blaze Advisor in originations, our management team realized we could expand it throughout the enterprise," said Van Zyl. "The vision is to expand across the entire lifecycle and across many products."
As part of this project, FICO introduced a standards-based decision implementation practice, Decision Implementation Accelerator, to the bank, and worked closely with African Bank to understand how to approach each decision scenario.

"The FICO team is a very good fit for us," said Van Zyl. "We don't see them as a service provider. Even partner doesn't do it justice. The FICO team members are like mentors to us. We get a lot out of this relationship."

"Centralized decision control is the goal of every bank," said Derick Cluley, senior director of client sales, who leads FICO's operations in Africa. "It is a difficult challenge, but essential if you're going to execute true customer-level management. African Bank's far-reaching vision has put them in the best-in-class category for decision management."