Westpac New Zealand has clinched the 2024 FICO Decisions Pioneer Award for its strategic use of the FICO Platform to drive hyper-personalisation and accelerate digital service innovation, driving customer engagement up by 25 per cent and operational costs down by 40 per cent.

The bank's partnership with FICO also resulted in improvements in automated decision processes, tripled production deployment, saw customer rehabilitation improve by 10 per cent to date, and overall faster implementation of new projects.

"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 Risk Analytics Senior Manager at Westpac NZ, Regan Goble.

Westpac NZ has shifted its focus from individual decisions on a customer's account to managing customers across all their accounts and throughout their lifetime with the bank. The bank expanded its use of the FICO Platform throughout 2023 to support a range of banking functions, including collections, credit, and business strategy.

"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 customise automated decision models to keep up with our customer expectations and regulatory requirements as the banking industry evolves," Goble said. "With the support of rich, centralised 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."

Westpac NZ leveraged FICO Platform's omni-channel engagement capability to significantly increase its contact with customers, reduce operational costs, and support customers through financial uncertainty. "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," Goble said.

The enhancements in collections alone led to a 25% increase in digital engagement, a 40% cost reduction, and 10% higher customer rehabilitation rates.

"Westpac NZ's investment in decisioning technology elevates industry standards, boosting operational efficiency, regulatory compliance, and customer communications," said chief marketing officer at FICO, Nikhil Behl.

"Westpac NZ is a worthy winner of FICO's Pioneer Award accolade because it responded to the need to modernise 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.