African Bank can now launch new credit strategies 30 percent faster at 25 percent lower cost and can make changes to credit strategies in two days instead of two months. These are some of the results reported by African Bank, after adopting FICO decision management software as the central decision-making hub of the bank.

The bank’s recent transformation included an extensive review of bank operations, which showed that the existing decision-making processes created inefficiencies and missed opportunities for reacting to the market.

“We had the entire bank look at all existing logic going into our decision-making process, which was fragmented over different applications and teams,” said Dawid Van Zyl, program executive credit decisioning at African Bank, who led the team tasked with finding optimal ways to run the business.

The team chose FICO^® Blaze Advisor^® decision rules management system to manage its centralized decisions. After a short implementation period, African Bank is now using Blaze Advisor for decision services in four major modules, with 11 bespoke environments within those modules. The bank is able to manage all of this with a single easy-to-use interface, and now has full lifecycle control over the entire system.

This project shows the power of centralized decisions across the enterprise, a concept that that has been discussed for years but has been realized by very few firms. New analytics and decision management technology mean companies of any kind, anywhere, can see improvements in decision quality, consistency and cost, while satisfying regulations that call for better corporate governance.