Financial Services

First Look – Experian hosted decisioning solutions

May 24, 2010

I got a quick update from Roger Ahern at Experian recently. Roger runs a recently founded group focused on hosted decisioning applications. Experian also has a Decision Analytics group with teams handling software (their Strategy ManagementSM and ProbeSM products), fraud products (like Precise IDSM) and Decision Sciences (custom analytic models and related services).  Experian’s Credit [...]

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Teradata – National Australia Bank and next best action

April 27, 2010

National Australia Bank group (a 15 year Teradata customer) presented on their use of Teradata for multi-channel marketing. NAB has 10.9M customers worldwide and about 38,000 staff. Brock Lynch, from the marketing group within the retail bank, gave an overview of their analytical CRM approach. NAB sees its analytical CRM assets as:

Complete customer data stored [...]

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Decision engines in financial services

April 26, 2010

This is a piece I wrote for Chris Pratt’s quarterly financial institutions newsletter
The use of technology to automate and manage decisions, especially high volume decisions essential to day-to-day operational execution, is expanding rapidly. Beginning with the consumer credit business, use of decision engines and decision management has spread to all aspects of financial services [...]

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New Rexer Analytics survey

March 30, 2010

Syndicated from BeyeNetwork
I recently got the survey results from the annual data mining survey that Karl Rexer of Rexer Analytics runs. You can get the summary here or the full results from Karl but here are my thoughts:

Data mining is everywhere. The most cited areas are CRM / Marketing and Financial Services with a [...]

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First Look – GDS Link

March 25, 2010

I got an update from GDS Link recently, a risk management solutions company focused on data access, decisioning and model implementation. Launched in 2006 by folks former Experian – Scorex management, the company’s core product is Dataview360 (launched in 2007). They have 23 customers worldwide.
As I have noted before, a common problem in financial services [...]

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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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