Belvo and FICO Announce Partnership to Expand Credit Access in Brazil Through Open Finance

The Belvo Open Finance Score, powered by FICO, will help lenders make more accurate and inclusive risk assessments

SÃO PAULO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--FICO, a global analytic software company and recognized leader in AI decisioning platforms, and Belvo, the leading open finance data and payments platform in Latin America, today announced a strategic partnership aimed at expanding credit access in Latin America. The two firms are developing an interpretable and explainable machine learning model that will provide a customer score based on consumer-permissioned transaction-level data, aimed at increasing credit access for consumers, improving banks’ risk management, and empowering lenders to create personalized financial experiences for their customers. It was announced today at the Febraban Tech Conference in São Paulo that the score is expected to be available in Brazil later this year.

The Belvo Open Finance Score, powered by FICO’s AI Innovation and Development team using AI techniques such as interpretable neural networks, will produce a credit risk score based on open finance transactions from a multitude of financial accounts (credit, debit, current accounts, savings, investment, etc.) permissioned by the customer and securely processed through Belvo’s open finance infrastructure. By incorporating data from additional sources, the score will provide an analytical tool for financial institutions that will enhance their use of existing credit bureau scores and internal models. It can benefit all credit grantors that seek to leverage open finance to improve customer decisions.

“The speed of change in consumers’ behavior since the pandemic is astonishing, and we have an opportunity to bring new insights to lending decisions,” said Albert Morales, Belvo’s general manager in Brazil. “Open finance data provides a much wider picture of the circumstances of people and companies. Together with FICO, we are capturing the predictive value from all this data and summarizing it in a score that will help financial institutions make more accurate risk assessments and identify creditworthy people they may be missing today.”

“Open finance data has the potential to be a major component of a country's financial and economic ecosystem, as seen in Europe,” said Alexandre Graff, FICO’s senior vice president of Global Partnerships and Alliances. “The solution we are developing with Belvo can be a game-changer for increased financial inclusion, and advances FICO's mission to help more people get access to credit, as expressed in our Global Financial Inclusion Initiative.”

About FICO

FICO (NYSE: FICO) powers decisions that help people and businesses around the world prosper. Founded in 1956, the company is a pioneer in the use of predictive analytics and data science to improve operational decisions. FICO holds more than 200 US and foreign patents on technologies that increase profitability, customer satisfaction and growth for businesses in financial services, telecommunications, health care, retail and many other industries. Using FICO solutions, businesses in nearly 120 countries do everything from protecting 2.6 billion payment cards from fraud, to helping people get credit, to ensuring that millions of rental cars are in the right place at the right time. Our FICO® Score, used by 90% of top US lenders, is the standard measure of consumer credit risk, improving risk management, credit access and transparency. FICO opened its office in Brazil in 1998.

Learn more at https://www.fico.com

FICO is a registered trademark of Fair Isaac Corporation in the U.S. and other countries.

About Belvo

Belvo is the leading open finance data and payments platform in Latin America, founded in May 2019 by Pablo Viguera and Oriol Tintoré. The company enables fintechs and innovative financial institutions to access and interpret data as well as initiate payments from their end-users accounts – with the aim of powering more modern, secure, and inclusive products. Belvo’s platform currently provides connections with over 60 financial institutions in Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia and already works with more than 150 clients, including some of the region's fastest-growing leading financial companies including both B2B and B2C players like banks, credit providers, and personal finance management tools.

Belvo is backed by some of the world's leading venture capital funds, including Kaszek, Founders Fund, Future Positive, Visa, and Citi Ventures, and has received a total of $56 million in investment to date.

For more information, visit belvo.com.