StepChange Debt Charity chooses FICO to help debt-ridden people

By Gloria Methri

StepChange, the UK-based debt advice charity has partnered with global analytics software provider FICO to help assess people in problem debt. StepChange will utilise the flexibility and hyper-personalisation of the FICO platform to recommend the best outcome to each consumer, thereby helping them become debt-free.

“As part of our back-office transformation, we saw the need to improve the flexibility and capability of our existing decision engine to be able to centralize our logic from three disparate systems — our old rules platform did not give us the capabilities we need to be fit for the future,” said Matt Bentley, head of change and enterprise architecture at StepChange.

“We also needed to simplify the management of strategies and do more rigorous testing of new strategies. After a review of the market, we found that the FICO Platform gave us the greatest capabilities in all these areas. The charity’s commitment to continuing to provide hyper-personalised debt advice and being able to explain customer decisions in real-time enables us to achieve the best outcome for every consumer.”

FICO Platform enables firms to ingest data, develop deep new insights with AI and ML, make hyper-personalized decisions at scale, and achieve world-class business outcomes. It is uniquely suited to maximize customer satisfaction, loyalty, and long-term retention.

“It is important to us that FICO Platform has a microservice-oriented architecture — we can call up the decision service when needed in our processes,” Bentley said. “This is a much more manageable approach that fits perfectly in our new IT ecosystem. We will be able to pull in more data sets than our legacy system can handle, improving our customer advice. FICO Platform is also a very user-friendly platform, which reduces our training needs.”

“StepChange performs an incredibly important public service by providing free debt advice in an impartial way to anyone who needs it,” said Matt Cox, vice president and general manager for FICO in EMEA. “That service has never been more important than now when inflation is high, energy costs are rising, and many people find it hard to manage their payments and debt. We are proud to partner with them to make sure people can get the most relevant, most personalized recommendations possible.”