Fair Isaac Launches New Decision Making Software for Insurance, Financial Services Industries

Fair Isaac Corporation, a provider of analytics and decision technology, has announced the availability of its Enterprise Decision Manager (EDM) software solution. According to Fair Isaac, EDM gives organizations in multiple industries, including the insurance industry, control of their automated decisions while reducing the time and costs required to incorporate important changes in business priorities into their decision systems.

Fair Isaac said that EDM combines predictive analytics, business rules and business user control into a complete platform for managing decisions across an enterprise. It integrates other Fair Isaac decision management tools – such as Fair Isaac Blaze Advisor for rules management, Model Builder for model development and Decision Optimizer for improved decisions – that have been used by more than 250 organizations. Combined and extended, these tools provide any business that makes large numbers of dynamic, high-impact operational decisions, including underwriting and claims management decisions, with the capability to accelerate the development and deployment of decision management applications.

According to Fair Issac, EDM leverages a company’s existing technology investments in data warehousing and business application systems to enable consistently smarter decisions fueled by analytics. The software is available on a number of platforms ranging from Windows laptops to IBM Mainframes, while also available on all the leading J2EE application servers as well as Linux and .Net environments. Because the software is database independent, businesses also can leverage their Oracle, DB2 and SQL Server-based data stores.

EDM has the ability to view and manage complete decision processes from a single graphical interface, said the Fair Issac announcement. Users can flexibly combine rules, models, scores, strategy trees and other critical elements into decisioning applications. The software includes a wizard for importing predictive analytics from model development. There’s no need for programmers to code the models, because at runtime the software automatically generates the code required to execute the model process in target operational environments, whether real-time or offline. In addition to importing the model algorithm, characteristics, weights and reason codes, it incorporates complete variable generation as well. After deployment, users can change decision components or sequence at any time, with changes immediately available to all business applications. The net effect is the ability to deploy predictive models four to 10 times faster than previously possible.

“Organizations require greater consistency in the way decisions are made,” said Henry Morris, group vice president for applications and information access software research at IDC. “This is important for competitive reasons and, increasingly, regulatory compliance reasons. Companies must demonstrate that decisions are not arbitrary but rather that they follow established procedures.”

Businesses can customized Fair Isaac services associated with EDM. Fair Isaac offers a six-step decision automation process that helps to identify a company’s needs and design, develop, deploy and refine their automated decision systems. This process can apply to businesses in any industry, including financial services, insurance, healthcare, government and telecommunications.