Banco Ficohsa Significantly Increases Sales and Profits with Decision Management Technology

© 2017 Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved. 1

DECISION MANAGEMENTBanco Ficohsa Significantly Increases Sales and

Profits with Decision Management Technology

“The partnership we have developed with FICO over the years has helped us become more agile in our analytic capabilities and has significantly increased our profitability.”Zadik Lopez, Regional Analytics Manager, Banco Ficohsa

Using FICO® Blaze® Advisor decision rules management system and FICO® Decision Optimizer, Banco Ficohsa has:

Increased sales and profits:• 40% increase in sales for its extra cash

product within 3 months

• Uplift of 35% in profitability per account with its credit line optimization strategy

Improved business functioning:• Reduced time to market from 6

months to 15 days for new strategy implementation and from 1 month to 1 day for strategy updates

• Reduced IT involvement from 100% to 5%

• Increased granularity of segmentation strategies from 10 to 75 treatments

Banco Ficohsa Significantly Increases Sales and


Client: Banco Ficohsa, a top-10 bank in Central America

Challenge: The bank wanted to be more consistent, agile and segmented with its implementation of strategies in originations and account management.

Solution: FICO® Blaze Advisor® decision rules management system, FICO® Decision Optimizer

Results: By applying rules and optimization technology, Banco Ficohsa has significantly increased sales and profits. In addition, it has reduced time to market for new and updated strategies, reduced IT involvement and increased granularity of segmentation.



© 2017 Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved. 2

Decision Rules and Optimization Enable Spectacular GrowthBanco Ficohsa started out as a small corporate bank in Honduras. Until 2007, credit card was not one of its core products. Like many banks of that size, most of its decisions and policies were hard-coded into in-house applications and others were just written on paper and managed manually. This made it hard to be consistent and difficult to implement strategies. “Even though our originations and account management strategies were well-designed, we couldn’t be sure the treatment assigned to the customer was being implemented,” says Zadik Lopez, Regional Analytics Manager at Banco Ficohsa. “In order to grow our business, we needed to be more consistent, agile and granular with customer segmentation.” Banco Ficohsa implemented FICO® Blaze Advisor® decision rules management system five years ago. The solution was focused on approvals and assignments for originations and cross-selling and behavioral scoring for account management.

Agility and Granular Segmentation Lead to Big Increases in SalesIn the first year, Banco Ficohsa applied Blaze Advisor to the extra cash product strategy that targeted existing customers and was based on credit card behavior. With Blaze Advisor, the bank had the agility to update the strategy in one day, as opposed to one month. This gave the bank the ability to swiftly adjust to changes in the market or from competitors. Within three months, the bank saw a 40% uplift in extra cash sales per month. And five years later, the bank has improved that mark by 15%. “Blaze Advisor gave us the agility we needed to quickly and easily make changes to our strategy,” says Lopez.

With the implementation of Blaze Advisor, the bank was able to drill down into very granular risk customer segments in order to provide the best offer for each customer. “Blaze Advisor has enabled us to get as granular as we want. Previously we could only hard-code as much as 10 segments for a strategy. Beyond that, it was very difficult for the IT team to code, and even harder to track” says Lopez. “Using Blaze Advisor,

we were able to apply 75 treatments to this strategy, which allowed us to target to segments that had the same risk but a higher return.”

Rules Enable Regional Expansion and Ease Transition Through Merger Banco Ficohsa became the largest bank in Honduras and was able to expand to Guatemala, Panama and Nicaragua. “Blaze has allowed us to be very agile in changing treatments for interest rates, line assignments, loan amounts, line increases and line decreases for different segments in several countries at the same time,” says Lopez. “Before, we had to be very careful and stick with one strategy for a long period of time. Convincing our head of risk head to try something different was very hard, due to difficulty in implementation and inaccuracy of results. With Blaze Advisor we were able to implement challenger strategies with increased agility, which allowed us to test different treatments to different customer segments. Given that, we were able to compare results for adjustments, enabling us to implement winning strategies. We used to have IT involved in 100% of our implementations.

“Because we had no restrictions on the granularity of the strategy, we were able to get a 50% increase in profitability per account.”Zadik Lopez, Regional Analytics Manager, Banco Ficohsa

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That is now down to 5% because our business experts can go into Blaze Advisor and adjust strategies on their own.”

In 2014, Banco Ficohsa acquired Citibank’s consumer banking business in Honduras. Banco Ficohsa was able to use FICO® Blaze Advisor® decision management system to set the rules and merge the strategies from Citibank into its own system. Because of the ease of implementation, it took Banco Ficohsa only a month and a half to migrate the business rules and complete the transition of the largest acquisition by a Honduran bank to date.

Expanding Its Business with OptimizationWith its expansion strategy, Banco Ficohsa has become a bank with significant presence in four countries and a top leading financial institution

in Central America. While growth was fast in the beginning, it has become progressively more challenging. “We are using advanced technology to identify all the risk and return opportunities within our current portfolio,” says Lopez. “Our vision is to be as segmented as possible, giving the right offer to the right customer.”

Banco Ficohsa partnered with FICO to develop a new optimization strategy for credit line increases — using Blaze Advisor to implement the strategy, which resulted in a 35% increase in profitability per account on a yearly basis. “We could not have implemented this strategy if it was hard-coded because it had 50 different treatments,” says Lopez. “Because we had no restrictions on the granularity of the strategy, we were able to obtain that incremental boost in profitability.”

The analytics team is taking it one step further by using FICO® Decision Optimizer to build its own optimization strategies. “We have been aggressive with our use of analytics to make our portfolio more efficient,” says Lopez. “We experienced a tremendous gain by using decision rules and we believe that optimization will take us even further.”

To learn more about FICO®

Decision Management Suite,

go to www.fico.com/dms.

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Banco Ficohsa Significantly Increases Sales and Profits with Decision Management Technology