Westpac NZ wins FICO Award after successfully adopting platform and enterprise decision analytics
At FICO World, the industry’s leading analytic and AI event, Westpac NZ has won the 2024 FICO Decisions Pioneer Award, for using the industry-leading capabilities of FICO Platform to advance hyper-personalisation and accelerate digital service innovation.
The bank’s partnership with FICO has resulted in major improvements in automated decision processes, which has been reflected in better customer engagement and faster implementation of new projects across the bank.
“With FICO Platform we’ve been able to shift from focusing on individual decisions we make on a customer’s account, to thinking strategically about how we manage customers across all of their accounts and throughout their lifetime with the bank,” said Regan Goble, Risk Analytics Senior Manager at Westpac NZ.
“We are proud to be FICO Platform pioneers because the software provides a solution capable of accommodating the diverse use cases across our banking operations. We can now rapidly build, test, deploy and customise automated decision models to keep up with our customer expectations and regulatory requirements as the banking industry evolves,” said Goble.
The bank expanded its use of FICO Platform throughout 2023 to support a range of banking functions, from collections and credit to business strategy.
“What’s truly exciting is the pace at which we can innovate and make improvements to benefit our customers,” Goble emphasised. “We’ve more than doubled our decision model and programme deployments in the last two years, including enhancements, new services, and regulatory change responses.”
Enterprise-Wide Decisioning
The comprehensive consolidation of decision assets and data into a unified platform has allowed Westpac NZ to deliver tangible benefits to its customers through hyper-personalisation and increased agility.
When Cyclone Gabrielle and other severe weather events hit New Zealand in early 2023, the bank was able to quickly respond by augmenting its collections and contact strategy.
“With the support of rich, centralised data and analytics capabilities, we are better positioned to quickly stand up new services for customers facing challenges such as natural disasters, or more recently cost-of-living pressures,” said Goble.
Additionally, when new regulations in New Zealand mandated updated reporting requirements and lending practices, Westpac NZ was able to use FICO Platform to act swiftly.
“We leveraged FICO’s expertise and utilised its highly configurable platform to develop, test and deploy the new decision service within a quarter, when previously this may have taken at least 12 months,” emphasised Goble.
More Efficient and Engaging Customer Communications
Westpac NZ has also used FICO Platform’s omni-channel engagement capability to significantly increase its contact with customers.
“Our newly enhanced, data-driven collections and contact strategy is already helping us increase digital customer engagement, reduce operational costs and support customers through financial uncertainty,” concluded Goble.
“Westpac NZ’s investment in decisioning technology elevates industry standards, boosting operational efficiency, regulatory compliance, and customer communications,” said Nikhil Behl, chief marketing officer at FICO. “Amidst rising expectations from consumers, the enhanced operations and decisioning in collections alone led to a 25% increase in digital engagement, 40% cost reduction, and 10% higher customer rehabilitation rates.”
“Westpac NZ is a worthy winner of FICO’s Pioneer Award accolade because it responded to the need to modernise and replace end-of-life technology with a strategic investment that enhances capabilities across the entire bank with outstanding results,” said Andrew Birmingham, technology editor for Mi3 Australia and one of the FICO Decisions Awards judges.
