Fair Isaac Corp. may be the reason credit decisions now take weeks instead of months.

The data analytics company has partnered with Nationwide Building Society to deliver faster customer service based on FICO’s applied intelligence platform. A large part of that collaboration is capitalizing on the bank’s pre-existing system.

Nationwide’s Alex Goldbloom talks with the theCUBE about the bank’s collaboration with FICO.

“There was the unification across [Nationwide’s] lines of business and the ability to get a customer-level view and sort of use that as a stepping stone to drive incremental business,” said Bill Waid (pictured, left), chief product and technology officer at FICO. “This is something we see in a lot of customers … What happens after that is they’re looking to exploit what they actually have … and we traditionally see [artificial intelligence] as a mechanism to improve the outcomes that they’re looking for.”

Waid and Alex Goldbloom (pictured, right), chief information officer central functions (risk & internal audit, HR & COO-led functions), Nationwide, spoke with theCUBE’s Rob Strechay at FICO World, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed driving credit decisions with AI and improving customer service. (* Disclosure below.)

Streamlining credit decisions on FICO’s platform

Nationwide serves around 22 million customers in the United Kingdom and makes what Goldbloom estimates to be a million and a half credit risk decisioning steps each month. By partnering with FICO, Nationwide intends to significantly shorten the credit decision timeline.

“What we’re really driving at is a straight-through process for our customers, which they can access at any time of the day or night, seven days of the week, and they can feel comfortable that it’s going to be very little in the way of manual dropouts,” Goldbloom said. “They shouldn’t really have to talk to too many people on the phone unless they really want to.”

Nationwide also hopes to take a “360 view” of its customers, incorporating a wider range of factors into the decision-making process. Despite the significant role AI will play in the future of bank operations, Waid emphasizes that the integrity of the business comes first.

“We see a lot of use of AI to improve the outcomes, and AI has a place; it’s a tool, but remember this is a human business,” he said. “It involves human beings, and it’s controlled by humans. So the tool is the AI, and it helps facilitate, but it’s not the be-all end-all.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of FICO World:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for FICO World. Neither FICO, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE