InterACT

A collections session next with folks from Adeptra, Fair Isaac and GE Money talking about GE’s vision for virtual collections. The collections environment is extremely bad this year with massive growth in the need for collection agents. Delinquencies are up, problems are up, consumers are stressed. Scores are worsening (credit profiles are worse), payments are [...]

Wednesday begins with Antonio Paulo Conde from Citibank Brazil talking about an enterprise decision engine for originations in their retail bank.   Measuring and understanding the risk of new financial products is important and became more so as the sales teams gained more negotiation power. To address this Citibank used Blaze Advisor to build an [...]

Last full session today is Lisa Kart and Jean Zoch of Fair Isaac talking about optimal pricing – balancing profitability with competitiveness. Lisa’s focus, she says, is on what makes price optimization work. Price optimization is a very broad topic, even in financial services, but their focus is on being able to target price for [...]

Interesting session on the Mortgage Crisis next, subtitled “Implications for a Global Economy”. Joe Breeden of Strategic Analytics and Daniel Melo of Fair Isaac. Joe started by saying that this is the 3rd time this has happened in the last 16 years. And, as before, it’s not just about mortgage and it’s not just about [...]

Paul Daro was next giving some detail around the new architecture (introduced by Bernhard Nann). A number of trends were identified first: Clearly the move to a collection of services from monolithic applications has fundamentally changed the relationship of vendors to customers – now more about delivering services that can be fitted in to an [...]

Back on this blog for John Rymer of Forrester talking about dynamic business applications (about which I have blogged before) and how the next generation of systems will be designed for people and built for change. John began by showing a video of a broker’s desktop demonstration built by Adobe and some partners. Brokers are [...]

Next up was Chris Collard of Dell talking about building a decision engine. Chris had done an implementation at Dell Financial Services and was sharing some of his experience with replicating that at Dell. Chris talks about decision engines as full decomposed applications – data, process and logic all externalized. Chris’ central thesis is Effective [...]

After lunch I joined the Insurance track and listened to Don Light of Celent (who wrote this nice paper some time ago) and Mike Gordon of Fair Isaac. Mike started and his first slide was headlined “survival of the fittest” which seems like the right headline! There is clearly a lot on in insurance these [...]

Next up was Stuart Crawford, part of Fair Isaac’s extensive research staff, on new approaches to the creation, visualization and comparison of decision trees or, as Fair Isaac calls them, Strategies. Stuart has been working at Fair Isaac for many years and has a lot of background in analytics. This work is about how to [...]

I started with an interesting breakfast this morning with Ian Ayres and Larry Rosenberger. Ian is the author of Super Crunchers (reviewed here in the wiki) and Larry is a research fellow and ex-CEO of Fair Isaac. The two of them were great conversationalists and we ranged across randomized testing (adaptive control), the power of [...]

Next week is InterACT and I will be blogging. You can also follow what I post, and what anyone else attending posts, at these locations: Hastags – http://hashtags.org/tag/interact2008/ Eventtrack – http://eventtrack.info/index.php?t_event=interact2008 Both have instructions about how to add you own posts/twitter streams to the collective so if anyone attending is on twitter etc, let me [...]

I am involved in two great decision management conferences this year and I wanted to quickly post about them to encourage you to attend – apologies to readers of my other blogs who may see this information more than once. First up is InterACT, Fair Isaac’s show on decision management and analytics, April 27-30. I [...]