Posts tagged as:

Financial Services

First Look – FICO Xpress and Business Rules

February 17, 2010

Optimization is a mathematical process for finding the best decision for a given business problem – usually highest profit, lowest cost given a set of constraints. Involve applying an algorithm to data, decision variables, constraints and an objective function. In financial services and insurance optimization is still fairly new (unlike, say, supply chain) but the [...]

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Marketing Mix Modeling at Walmart Financial Services #pawcon

February 16, 2010

Final Predictive Analytics World presentation for me – Walmart Financial Services and Mu Sigma talking about marketing mix modeling. Walmart Financial Services focuses on the unbanked or under-banked. Specific services like money transfers, check cashing can be quite high volume in some locations and some 1,000 locations have branded MoneyCenters. Mu Sigma is an Indian [...]

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First Look – TRIAD 8.5 and Decision Graph

February 15, 2010

TRIAD 8.5 has just been released and is the latest version of FICO’s combined account manager and customer manager platform for financial services companies (its focus is on accounts/customers where credit risk is a critical issue). I got an update recently focused on Decision Graph. Decision Graph is  one of the new capabilities. Decision Graph [...]

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Risk by risk – a decision-centric approach to risk management

February 15, 2010

Syndicated from Smart Data Collective
Risk management is an important topic for many organizations, especially those in financial services. Most of these organizations acquire risk one customer, one transaction at a time – this customer is not going to be able to pay (risk), this transaction is fraudulent (risk), this deal will [...]

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First Look – Dulles Research Carolina

January 14, 2010

I recently met the folks at Dulles Research, a scientific computing outfit focused on analytic solutions for enterprise software. The folks who founded Dulles had previously worked at Marketswitch (focused on large scale optimization and sold to Experian in 2004) and have a long history of working with companies who are serious about using analytics [...]

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Some analytic opportunities

January 11, 2010

An old friend introduced me to Rex Huston <rhuston@maisearch.com> before the break. Rex is looking for analytics folks for a number of open position. He is seeking highly-skilled and motivated professionals who can effectively assess the strengths and weaknesses of complex, statistically-based models used by top-tier financial services clients for credit risk management, market risk [...]

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Update – Red Hat Jboss Business Rules

December 2, 2009

I got a chance to catch up with the folks from Red Hat recently. I have reviewed the new functionality that Mark Proctor and his team have been adding to turn the old Drools rule engine into a competitive Business Rules Management System or BRMS when the latest release came out. This time we chatted [...]

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Early results from the Rexer data mining survey

November 23, 2009

Karl Rexer of Rexer Analytics sent me a note the other day about some early results of the 3rd Annual Data Miner Survey in the Spring of 2009.  Like the previous surveys (I blogged about the 2008 survey), it  examined data miners’ algorithms and tools, opinions and views, types of data analyzed, challenges encountered, and [...]

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Business Rules Forum 2009 – Day 1 #brf

November 4, 2009

It’s the end of day 1 of the Business Rules Forum/Enterprise Decision Management Summit and time to write a wrap up post for the day – no live blogging today as I have too much on as track chair to sit behind my keyboard!
Today I got to attend Jim Sinur’s keynote and sessions from Roger [...]

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Balancing Intuition and Analytics in Decision Making #PBLS

October 29, 2009

Malcolm Gladwell, Thornton May (author of The New Know: Innovation Powered by Analytics)and Tom Davenport (author of Competing on Analytics, reviewed here) made up a high powered panel for this. Various random comments follow:

Healthcare is being used as an example by the panel as an obvious point where analytics and expertise intersect. There is a [...]

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SAS – An executive overview

October 27, 2009

I am spending some time as a guest of SAS this week and we got started today with Jim Goodnight, CEO of SAS. He began by describing SAS Institute’s 33 years of continuous revenue growth as well as similarly growing reinvestment in R&D. SAS has not laid anyone off this year, for which kudos, and [...]

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Financial Services Analysis For Free

July 7, 2009

If you work at a Financial Services organization there is a great new source of free information. Chris Pratt, formerly of Tower Group and Financial Insights has started her own firm – Pratt Associates. She covers credit solutions, scoring/analytics, core banking and BPM solutions. Chris really knows the space and understands how banks work and [...]

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First Look – ID Analytics and MyIDScore

June 22, 2009

I got a briefing from ID Analytics recently – mostly to catch up on their new service for consumers My ID Score (https://myidscore.com).
ID Analytics has historically been focused on B2B services – helping companies identify applications that are potentially fraudulent. They have an ID Network that collects information from 6 of the top 10 credit [...]

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Customer Stories from the SAS Global Forum

April 1, 2009

Syndicated from BeyeNetwork
Last week I posted a couple of times about my impressions from the SAS Global Forum. In one post I said that “SAS customers talk about the great results they get when they put their predictive analytics to work in operational systems” so I thought I should expand on that a little, using [...]

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New Challenges for creating predictive analytic models

February 20, 2009

Syndicated from Smart Data Collective
Khosrow Hassibi of KXEN and Will Tangalos of Wells Fargo presented together on the challenges of predictive analytics in the real world and on Wells Fargo as an example of how some of these challenges can be met. Khosrow began with an overview of the basic predictive analytic tasks:

Understand the business [...]

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The High ROI of Data Mining for Innovative Organizations

February 19, 2009

Syndicated from Smart Data Collective
John Elder presented a collection of case studies to showcase the ROI of data mining. John started by making the point that many of his case studies had technical success but not business success – an interesting statistic. John sees three major ways that predictive analytics can help – streamlining, eliminating [...]

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Analytics run amok?

February 3, 2009

Joe McKendrick pointed me to a story on ABC News today -  ‘Good Morning America’ Gets Answers: Some Credit Card Companies Financially Profiling Customers. The story is worrying and has some good reporting in but, as usual, the analytics behind the whole thing are poorly described.
So, first things first. The headline gets us off on [...]

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Using decision management to prepare for an unknown future

November 18, 2008

Recently, Ronan Bradley discussed the challenges for banks in the area of compliance, given the rapidly changing environment. He made three specific points with which I agree and that I think shows the value of a decision management approach for banks and others facing an unknown but difficult regulatory environment in the next year or [...]

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First Look – Savvion 7.5

November 11, 2008

I got a quick overview of Savvion 7.5 this week. Savvion is one of the pure-play BPM vendors with customers in Telecommunications, Media, Financial Services and Manufacturing (along with some retail and healthcare). They released version 7.5 at the end of September.
Savvion has recently been investing in domain-specific vertical solutions built on their horizontal [...]

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Building Blocks of Decision Management

October 30, 2008

Michele Edelman of Discover presented on Building Blocks of Decision Management: “Tools to Rule”. Michele spends a lot of time educating people inside Discover and her team use sources like McKinsey to show executives why EDM matters. For instance, a report on top 10 macro-economic trends:

Centers of economic activity will shift profoundly not just globally [...]

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