FICO is evolving into a data analytics powerhouse, introducing an AI-driven platform designed to streamline financial operations while safeguarding the very data that fuels it. Managing financial data through one platform layer can be like looking at a “spiderweb,” according to Bill Waid, chief product and technology officer. Clients will be relying on data from different sources, trying to avoid redundancy and create linkage between pieces of the same data. “We have our own proprietary way of actually identifying linkage and householding,” Waid said. “And actually being able to bring together and unify that data so that you have common contexts for each of them, but we also provide an open-source way of doing that where they might be done by the data partner itself.” FICO helps its users create a core data catalog, from which they can derive predictive reasoning through AI features. The goal is collecting data and harnessing AI for a specific, concrete goal, Waid emphasized. “Just collecting data isn’t actually a good business outcome,” he said. “A good business outcome is that I’ve used that data … because very often the predictiveness isn’t in the data itself, it’s in some combination of those data elements over time.”