FICO Credit Scores Coming to Russia with NBKI

National Bureau of Credit Histories (NBKI), the premier credit bureau in Russia, and Fair Isaac Corporation (NYSE:FIC), the leading provider of analytics and decision management technology, today announced a ground-breaking, multi-year alliance to introduce Fair Isaac’s global-standard FICO credit risk scoring technology to Russian lenders by this fall.

The flexible design of the FICO Score will enable lenders across Russia to assess consumer credit risk with a significantly greater degree of precision. This precision will enable lenders to more confidently tailor their credit product offerings to the risk profile of individual consumers. In this way lenders can safely increase their penetration of the market, reduce their risk exposure, and improve their profits in a controlled and customizable manner. Consumers also stand to benefit over time from improved access to credit products at more competitive rates.

“Lenders in Russia need state-of-the-art bureau scores to better assess consumer credit risk against a background of continuing rapid growth in consumer lending,” said Lisa Nelson, vice president of Global Scoring for Fair Isaac. “By applying Fair Isaac’s unparalleled analytics experience to the comprehensive consumer database of NBKI we expect to set the standard for credit risk assessment in Russia for many years to come.”

“We want the best solutions in the world for our clients,” said Dr. Alexander Vikulin, General Director of NBKI. “Through our alliance with Fair Isaac, we will help Russian banks combine proven FICO scoring technology and our robust credit data with the banks’ own sophisticated systems, so they can control consumer credit risk with a significantly greater degree of precision and profitability, while also acting in the best interests of the consumer.”

FICO Score at NBKI will provide a solution specifically tailored for a market where the volume and depth of credit bureau data are evolving at an accelerated rate. Russian lenders will be able to use FICO Score at all stages in the consumer credit lifecycle to improve decisions throughout the lending process, from account acquisition and account origination to full portfolio management. FICO Score adds value to a bank’s existing custom application and behavior models because the score provides an easily used measure of a consumer’s risk based on interactions with other lenders. FICO Score can also assist Russian lenders to meet their Basel II and other regulatory compliance requirements.

Fair Isaac’s FICO Score applies the company’s industry-standard FICO credit risk scoring technology to rank-order consumers according to their credit risk. Designed to be consistently scaled across credit bureaus and across national borders, the score has already established the global standard for consumer credit risk assessment. The Fair Isaac technology underlying the scoring models enables rapid deployment in any country with credit bureau data.

Moscow-based National Bureau of Credit Histories, OJSC, is established by leading Russian banks and is known as a leader in the Russian credit information market. NBKI is significantly more successful than all other Russian credit bureaus with the largest number of partner banks and the largest number of credit reports issued. NBKI also has the highest hit-rate for Russian bureaus with over 60% of reports returned with a history. One third of all Russian credit histories are stored at NBKI. Learn more about NBKI at www.nbki.ru.

Fair Isaac Corporation combines trusted advice, world-class analytics and innovative applications to help businesses make smarter decisions. Fair Isaac’s solutions and technologies for decision management turn strategy into action and elevate business performance by giving organizations the power to automate more decisions, improve the quality of their decisions, and connect decisions across their business. Clients in 80 countries work with Fair Isaac to increase customer loyalty and profitability, cut fraud losses, manage credit risk, meet regulatory and competitive demands, and rapidly build market share.