FICO Falcon Platform Reviews

Falcon identifies anomalies in bank customer behavior to detect fraud. For example, say a person in Sao Paulo consistently spends $200 a week for 10 years, and we see a $2,000 transaction one week. Falcon can set rules to identify suspicious activity at each point of sale during every transaction. 

Let's say we see seven million transactions on a given day. In all those transactions, we might detect 20 people potentially committing fraud. For me, 20 people are too many because that could mean 140,000 transactions that we need to refer to a call center for follow-up with the customer. 

We need a customer service rep to call and say, "Oh, hi, ma'am. Did you make these transactions? Yes or no?" It's so much work to validate a transaction. Without Falcon, we would need much more staff to call customers and verify transactions, which means we would spend considerably more to make this work. 

I previously worked at Santander Bank FICO and Oracle. It was only about six months. FICO is working on a local model specifically for Brazil, whereas tools from Oracle and other vendors are only developed for general use. I haven't seen any other vendors who think like that until now.

Our solution here in Brazil doesn't work for Europe, Africa, the USA, Canada, or Mexico. It's unique to Brazil and designed based on the transaction patterns of people living here. 

FICO has all the information on our transactions, and the logs of old transactions are on the central server. It's the same for other banks like Fordesco, Santandar, CitiBank, etc. All these banks send their transactions to the server, and FICO Analytics uses all the information about transactions in Brazil to build a model.

Fraud will always be a problem here in Brazil, and I think blockchain technology is the future because it increases transparency in transactions. Even with Falcon, we need to spend time verifying transactions. I think a better way is to put the transactions in a blockchain. 

You can put these people on a block list if you know who made the fraudulent transactions. There is no way to do that because nobody has a blockchain solution, but I think that's where the industry is headed. Everything will be blockchain in the future. 

I worked with FICO for three years in Brazil and later as a consultant configuring Falcon for a bank. 

Falcon is stable.  The only problem we had was caused by a lost connection. To solve that problem, we set up a second account with another telecom provider, so if we lose connection on one, we can switch. 

Falcon is scalable. At first, we had 5 million daily transactions, but it increased to 7 million as more people began using credit cards. We needed to implement a solution to handle more transactions in the same amount of time. In AWS, it is easy to add servers and VPNs if you need more resources, so it was no problem for us. 

I've had bad experiences with FICO support. At the bank, we've faced critical problems where we only had minutes to find the solution, and it's hard to explain quickly. We contacted FICO, but they told us it was beyond their scope of support. They try to triage the call by asking us how much money we're losing, but I can't go into that. They have people responding to but not solving the problem. It was a frustrating experience.

Setting up Falcon is complex, and it takes a long time because you have to work with several people to configure the rules and tune them for all the account holders based on user behavior and the markets. 

It's hard to say how long your deployment will take. Once you establish a model, it takes some time to know if it works. It's based on long-term patterns in behavior. One day of transactions isn't enough to establish a pattern. I need at least 12 months of data to set a behavioral rule for a customer. However, most banks won't wait a year. They will say it's good enough after six months and give the go-ahead to implement the solution. This is one of the reasons why our model isn't working as well as it should. 

If you ask how long it takes to deploy Falcon, I would say it depends on what you want from me. If you don't have historical transaction data that you can use to build a model, it will take at least one year. If you have 20 years of data, we can implement it now with no problem.

When I was working at another bank, people often complained that FICO was expensive. I would tell them that it depends on the volume—for example, the old bank million 7 million transactions. If you don't have an adequate system, you will lose more money than you would spend on Falcon. FICO can pay for itself in one or two days if you compare it to the money you would lose otherwise. 

FICO is one of the best fraud detection platforms. However,  a small bank might find it too expensive. In that case, I would agree it's probably not worth it. However, it's a no-brainer if your bank has 50 million accounts and 7 million credit card transactions daily. 

I rate FICO Falcon Platform 10 out of 10.