StepChange Debt Charity Chooses FICO Platform to Help Assess People in Problem Debt

Greater system flexibility and microservices architecture means hyper-personalized recommendations for people in UK needing debt advice

LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Global analytics software leader FICO today announced that StepChange, the UK’s leading debt advice charity, will use FICO® Platform to help assess people in problem debt. StepChange will use the flexibility and hyper-personalisation of the platform to recommend the best individual outcome to each consumer, with the aim of helping them to become debt-free.

More information: www.fico.com/en/fico-platform

“As part of our back-office transformation, we saw the need to improve the flexibility and capability of our existing decision engine to be able to centralize our logic from three disparate systems — our old rules platform did not give us the capabilities we need to be fit for the future,” said Matt Bentley, head of change and enterprise architecture at StepChange. “We also needed to simplify the management of strategies, and do more rigorous testing of new strategies. After a review of the market, we found that FICO Platform gave us the greatest capabilities in all these areas. The charity’s commitment to continuing to provide hyper-personalised debt advice and being able to explain customer decisions in real time enables us to achieve the best outcome for every consumer.”

FICO^® Platform enables firms to ingest data, develop deep new insights with AI and ML, make hyper-personalized decisions at scale, and achieve world-class business outcomes. It is uniquely suited to maximize customer satisfaction, loyalty, and long-term retention.

“It’s important to us that FICO® Platform has a microservice-oriented architecture — we can call up the decision service when needed in our processes,” Bentley said. “This is a much more manageable approach that fits perfectly in our new IT ecosystem. We will be able to pull in more data sets than our legacy system can handle, improving our customer advice. FICO Platform is also a very user-friendly platform, which reduces our training needs.”

“StepChange performs an incredibly important public service by providing free debt advice in an impartial way to anyone who needs it,” said Matt Cox, vice president and general manager for FICO in EMEA. “That service has never been more important than now, when inflation is high, energy costs are rising and many people find it hard to manage their payments and debt. We are proud to partner with them to make sure people can get the most relevant, most personalized recommendations possible.”

FICO^® Platform has received the Banking Innovation of the Year Platinum Award in the Future Digital Awards for Fintech & Payments 2023, presented by Juniper Research. FICO Platform also received placement as a leader among top providers in “The Forrester Wave™: AI Decisioning Platforms, Q2 2023” report.

About StepChange

StepChange Debt Charity is the UK’s largest debt advice charity, helping hundreds of thousands of people a year. Founded in 1993, StepChange supports people experiencing debt problems through telephone and online services, and campaigns for change to reduce the harm and stigma associated with debt.

How your readers can get help with their debts

We provide the UK’s most comprehensive debt advice service, from budgeting tips through to managing debt solutions that enable to people to pay off or clear debts. All details about our free debt advice are available on our website.

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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 215 US and foreign patents on technologies that increase profitability, customer satisfaction and growth for businesses in financial services, insurance, telecommunications, health care, retail and many other industries. Using FICO solutions, businesses in more than 100 countries do everything from protecting 2.6 billion payment cards from fraud, to improving financial inclusion, to increasing supply chain resiliency. The FICO® Score, used by 90% of top US lenders, is the standard measure of consumer credit risk in the US and other countries, improving risk management, credit access and transparency. Learn more at www.fico.com.

FICO is a registered trademark of Fair Isaac Corporation in the United States and in other countries.