What is the Fair Isaac Corporation?

Published by Thomas Herold in Banking


Fair Isaac Corporation refers to the FICO company which trades on New York Stock Exchange under the legendary ticker FICO. The Fair Isaac Corporation proves to be a world leading analytics software firm. They assist businesses in over 90 countries in making better-informed decisions which improve profitability, growth, and client satisfaction. The firm pioneered Big Data and complex mathematical algorithms in order to successfully predict individual consumer behaviors literally decades ago. This has changed many industries and the whole world as we know it in consequence.

The Fair Isaac Corporation has many claims to fame. Their greatest is surely the most often used and most famous consumer credit score the FICO score which financial institutions especially in the United States employ in deciding whether or not to loan money or give credit to consumers everywhere. The company operates an impressive 25 different international locations, most of which are found in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Among its roster of clients are hundreds of insurance companies, banks, and retailers. The Fair Isaac organization also delivers recovery consulting and collections services, customer strategy consulting, operational readiness services and reviews and more service to companies.

The services which Fair Isaac Corporation delivers go out to corporations in over 90 countries for such varied tasks as managing risk, improving customer relations, fighting fraud, meeting tough government regulations, and maximizing operations across too many different industries to effectively count. A number of their various products touch whole industries for adaptation, as with the FICO score.

This is still the gold standard (and only real standard) for measuring consumer credit risk across the United States. The standard utilizes cloud computing and open source standards in order to optimize flexibility, lower costs, and improve speed of deployment. The firm prides itself on helping literally millions of Americans to manage and maintain their individual credit profiles’ health.

Fair Isaac Corporation was founded by Bill Fair the engineer and Earl Isaac the mathematician in 1958 and immediately began introducing credit analytic solutions like credit reporting and scoring which gave rise to the modern expansive era of credit in not only the United States but also throughout the developed world. They have patented and introduced the world to crucial technologies that impact all aspects of decision management. Among these are business rules management, predictive analysis, and business optimization. FICO’s offices around the globe serve such varied industries as health care, financial services, car industries, insurance, retail, public sector, telecommunications, pharmaceuticals, hospitality, travel, entertainment, media, utilities, and high technology.

A huge number of the Fair Isaac Corporation clients are over half of the largest 100 banks on earth, over 600 commercial and personal insurers across Europe and North America (including the top 10 largest American personal insurance carriers), over 400 retailers and mass merchandisers (among them a third of the largest hundred American retailers), the 100 largest American credit card issuers, and 95 out of the 100 biggest financial institutions across the United States. The company maintains and owns over 130 individual technology patents for its ground breaking processes.

American consumers are able to gain access to their credit scores entirely online thanks to their “my FICO” consumer division. The company makes a lot of its money from selling individual credit scores to the owners of the scores as well as to businesses throughout the country. This remains a critical component of their primary business model decades after they started offering them. Countless firms in the U.S. today still rely on the various services and products provided by Fair Isaac Corporation in order to reduce their corporate risk.


The term 'Fair Isaac Corporation' is included in the Banking edition of the Herold Financial Dictionary, which you can get from Amazon in Ebook or Paperback edition.