Santander US Auto Business Wins 2025 FICO Decisions Award for Machine Learning Credit Risk Analysis

Santander uses FICO Platform to offer financing solutions across a wide range of credit profiles

HOLLYWOOD, Fla.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--FICO World 25 – FICO (NYSE: FICO):

Highlights:

• The Santander US Auto business uses FICO® Platform to enhance the use of machine learning capabilities to support credit risk analysis.
• FICO Platform enables Santander US Auto to build an analytical framework for creating reusable, efficient systems that reduce development time.
• The Santander US Auto business has won a 2025 FICO® Decisions Award for category AI, Machine Learning & Optimization.

At its FICO® World conference today, global analytics software leader, FICO announced that the Santander US Auto business, one of the largest auto lenders in the U.S., has won a 2025 FICO® Decisions Award for its use of machine learning. The business has transformed its credit risk assessment processes using FICO® Platform and its applied analytics and machine learning capabilities. Santander, which manages a $60 billion asset portfolio and serves over three million customers, is using FICO Platform to streamline model development, improve governance, and enhance predictive analytics in response to evolving market conditions.

For more information on FICO Platform, visit: https://www.fico.com/en/fico-platform.

“The FICO team has been instrumental in enabling the Auto business to use a unified platform to be more efficient and accelerate our timelines. FICO helped our modeling team reduce the number of tasks, allowing for our data team to focus on interpreting the analytics,” said Bruce Jackson, head of the Santander US Auto Business and CEO of Santander Consumer.

Watch Santander tell their story, here: https://youtu.be/iseQCvr696g?si=3sMsK9nstMi24YjJ.

Santander is using FICO Platform to empower consumer credit risk in three primary functions: approving or declining credit applicants, assigned adverse action, and assessing the probability of default for use in pricing models. This allows the business to assess more applications for auto loans. The platform allows Santander to deploy machine learning and advanced analytics to drive business decisions and get new predictive models and strategies into production to keep pace with changing customer and market dynamics.

With rising interest rates and increased vehicle prices impacting affordability, Santander needed a more agile risk assessment framework. Legacy tools required manual, time-consuming recalibrations, delaying credit analysis and limiting the ability to respond quickly to market shifts.

“Santander’s adoption of machine learning is an example of how lenders can modernize credit risk analysis,” said Nikhil Behl, president of software at FICO. “Building a model more efficiently is imperative in today's competitive market. Santander's success in streamlining processes, reducing manual efforts, and gaining real-time insights into credit risk sets a strong benchmark for the industry.”

“What impressed me was how Santander transformed a slow, manual process into a seamless, real-time system,” said Joe McKendrick, analyst and senior contributor at Forbes and one of the FICO Decision Awards judges. “It didn’t just tweak its risk models—Santander overhauled how it makes decisions, making them faster, smarter, and more reliable.”

For its achievements, Santander Consumer USA has won a 2025 FICO® Decisions Award for AI, Machine Learning & Optimization. To see the full list of 2025 FICO Decisions Awards winners, check out: https://www.fico.com/en/decisionawards

About the FICO® Decision Awards

The FICO Decisions Awards recognize organizations that are achieving remarkable success using FICO solutions. A panel of independent judges with deep industry expertise evaluates nominations based upon measurable improvement in key metrics; demonstrated use of best practices; project scale, depth and breadth; and innovative uses of technology. The 2025 judges are:

• Regan Goble, risk analytics senior manager at Westpac NZ (Previous Winner)
• Megha Kumar, research vice president at IDC
• Joe McKendrick, analyst and senior contributor at Forbes
• Luiz Pacete, technology and marketing industry influencer
• Ali Paterson, founder and editor-in-chief at Fintech Finance
• Mike Roberts, head of unsecured retail risk at HSBC UK bank (Previous Winner)
• Erin Stillwell, evp, payment partnerships at Blankfactor
• Allan Tan, group editor-in-chief at Cxociety

The winners of the FICO Decisions Awards will be spotlighted at and win tickets to FICO® World 2025, May 6-9, 2025, at the Diplomat Hotel in Hollywood, Florida.

About FICO

FICO (NYSE: FICO) powers decisions that help people and businesses around the world prosper. Founded in 1956, the company is a pioneer in the use of predictive analytics and data science to improve operational decisions. FICO holds more than 200 US and foreign patents on technologies that increase profitability, customer satisfaction and growth for businesses in financial services, insurance, telecommunications, health care, retail and many other industries. Using FICO solutions, businesses in more than 80 countries do everything from protecting 4 billion payment cards from fraud, to improving financial inclusion, to increasing supply chain resiliency. The FICO® Score, used by 90% of top US lenders, is the standard measure of consumer credit risk in the US and has been made available in over 40 other countries, improving risk management, credit access and transparency.

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