Leading New Zealand bank with more than 1.5 million customers, wins FICO Pioneer Award for its advanced decision innovation

FICO World – FICO (NYSE: FICO)

Highlights:

• Westpac NZ wins the 2024 FICO^® Decisions Pioneer Award
• Westpac NZ increases customer engagement and process automation with FICO^® Platform
• Partnership with FICO delivers greater agility and data-driven collections improvements

Today at FICO^® World, the industry’s leading analytic and AI event, Westpac New Zealand has won the 2024 FICO^® Decisions Pioneer Award, for using the industry-leading capabilities of FICO^® Platform to advance hyper-personalization and accelerate digital service innovation.

The bank’s partnership with FICO has resulted in major improvements in automated decision processes, which has been reflected in better customer engagement and faster implementation of new projects across the bank.

“With FICO Platform we’ve been able to shift from focusing on individual decisions we make on a customer’s account, to thinking strategically about how we manage customers across all of their accounts and throughout their lifetime with the bank,” said Regan Goble, Risk Analytics Senior Manager at Westpac NZ.

“We are proud to be FICO Platform pioneers because the software provides a solution capable of accommodating the diverse use cases across our banking operations. We can now rapidly build, test, deploy and customize automated decision models to keep up with our customer expectations and regulatory requirements as the banking industry evolves,” said Goble.

Watch the Westpac New Zealand team tell their story on video

The bank expanded its use of FICO Platform throughout 2023 to support a range of banking functions, from collections and credit to business strategy.

“What’s truly exciting is the pace at which we can innovate and make improvements to benefit our customers,” Goble emphasized. “We’ve more than doubled our decision model and programme deployments in the last two years, including enhancements, new services, and regulatory change responses.”

Enterprise-Wide Decisioning

The comprehensive consolidation of decision assets and data into a unified platform has allowed Westpac NZ to deliver tangible benefits to its customers through hyper-personalization and increased agility.

When Cyclone Gabrielle and other severe weather events hit New Zealand in early 2023, the bank was able to quickly respond by augmenting its collections and contact strategy.

“With the support of rich, centralized data and analytics capabilities, we are better positioned to quickly stand up new services for customers facing challenges such as natural disasters, or more recently cost-of-living pressures,” said Goble.

Additionally, when new regulations in New Zealand mandated updated reporting requirements and lending practices, Westpac NZ was able to use FICO Platform to act swiftly.

“We leveraged FICO’s expertise and utilized its highly configurable platform to develop, test and deploy the new decision service within a quarter, when previously this may have taken at least 12 months,” emphasized Goble.

More Efficient and Engaging Customer Communications

Westpac NZ has also used FICO Platform’s omni-channel engagement capability to significantly increase its contact with customers.

“Our newly enhanced, data-driven collections and contact strategy is already helping us increase digital customer engagement, reduce operational costs and support customers through financial uncertainty,” concluded Goble.

“Westpac NZ’s investment in decisioning technology elevates industry standards, boosting operational efficiency, regulatory compliance, and customer communications,” said Nikhil Behl, chief marketing officer at FICO. “Amidst rising expectations from consumers, the enhanced operations and decisioning in collections alone led to a 25% increase in digital engagement, 40% cost reduction, and 10% higher customer rehabilitation rates.”

“Westpac NZ is a worthy winner of FICO’s Pioneer Award accolade because it responded to the need to modernize and replace end-of-life technology with a strategic investment that enhances capabilities across the entire bank with outstanding results,” said Andrew Birmingham, technology editor for Mi3 Australia and one of the FICO Decisions Awards judges.

More information about FICO^® Platform can be found here: https://www.fico.com/en/fico-platform

To see the full list of this year’s FICO^® Decision Awards winners, check out: https://www.fico.com/en/decisionsawards

About Westpac NZ

As a large New Zealand business and employer, Westpac NZ provides a range of financial services to New Zealand households and businesses. It has more than 1.5 million customers, 5,000 employees and has a footprint in communities nationwide.

https://www.westpac.co.nz/

About the FICO^® Decisions Awards

The FICO Decisions Awards recognize organizations that are achieving remarkable success using FICO solutions. A panel of independent judges with deep industry expertise evaluates nominations based upon measurable improvement in key metrics; demonstrated use of best practices; project scale, depth and breadth; and innovative uses of technology. The 2024 judges are:

• Andrew Birmingham, editor, Mi3
• Eric Kavanagh, CEO Bloor Group and host, InsideAnalysis
• Elizabeth Lumley, deputy editor, The Banker
• Paul Mah, senior editor, CDO Trends
• Laura Martins, editor, IT Forum
• Paul Robinson, VP credit management at Canadian Tire Bank (previous winner)
• Shiv Sehgal, EVP audience analytics at RSG Media (previous winner
• Nick Vitchev, director at Chartis

The winners of the FICO Decisions Awards will be spotlighted at and win tickets to FICO^® World 2024, April 15 – April 18, 2024 in San Diego, California

About FICO

FICO (NYSE: FICO) powers decisions that help people and businesses around the world prosper. Founded in 1956, the company is a pioneer in the use of predictive analytics and data science to improve operational decisions. FICO holds more than 200 US and foreign patents on technologies that increase profitability, customer satisfaction and growth for businesses in financial services, insurance, telecommunications, health care, retail and many other industries. Using FICO solutions, businesses in more than 100 countries do everything from protecting 4 billion payment cards from fraud, to improving financial inclusion, to increasing supply chain resiliency. The FICO^® Score, used by 90% of top US lenders, is the standard measure of consumer credit risk in the US and has been made available in over 40 other countries, improving risk management, credit access and transparency.

Learn more at www.fico.com.

FICO is a registered trademark of Fair Isaac Corporation in the US and other countries.

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