Copyright © 2010 http://jtonedm.com James Taylor
I caught up with a new (to me at least) decisioning platform recently. Scorto works with credit organizations to manage credit risks and make objective decisions when selling mass credit products. They offer what they refer to as decision support (but I would call blended decision management and decision support) in everything from personal/small commercial loan origination (secured and unsecured) to collections and fraud, Basel II reporting and portfolio analysis. They also offer technology for scoring. Solutions are customer-centric, not account centric, and can combine strategies for account and customer level.
Scorto describe themselves as focused on using the latest technology and getting the lowest cost of ownership for their clients. They have a business user oriented approach and are very focused on customization, localization for each specific customer. They are almost bureau-like, offering full lifecycle support from model development to deployment. They have 20 or so customers, all but 1 is a bank, in house financial organization or credit union.
Their Decision Server product is the core of their offering with specialized versions for each solution area. For instance, in loan origination their Loan Mart product contains the Loan Master, Strategy Maven, Admin and a core component. Besides the solution sets, CreditDecision is builds predictive models and Supervisor monitors deployed scores. In addition they have a forms designer and have pre-defined “workplaces” or user environments for credit experts, collateral managers, risk managers, heads of credit risk etc. Custom workplaces can also be developed.
- Strategy Maven
Strategy Maven is the design tool. The user is presented with a list of strategies and then can drag and drop steps in a strategy to build what I would call a decision flow. Nodes include data collection, segmentation, simple expressions, scoring models, conditional assignments etc. Each node details the information being flowed through the node. The nodes do not support a lot of rules each but do allows parallel execution, segment-specific processing, data persistence, joining and retrieving data, and reporting. This designer can be used to define batch processes as well as interactive ones.
Real strategies become VERY complicated as they are using graphical nodes for everything. They do allow sub-strategies but not nodes that represent large numbers of rules. They don’t consider themselves a process management tool and do urge clients to separate workflow and decision flow but they still have customers who use the product to handle workflow tasks like printing letters. It is also true that their customers tend to develop a single decision process or strategy in one picture rather than structuring it!
- CreditDecision
CreditDecision is their tool to create scoring models. It can bring in data, analyze it for distribution / outliers / missing data etc and then can present the data through various 3D visualizations. They offer lots of charts to show dependencies and ways to analyze data. They support four different methods to create models – decision trees, decision rules, neural networks and logistic regression. It seems like a nice interactive environment with lots of visualization tools, profit charts, lift curves etc etc. Their intent was to make this easy to use with lots of wizards and friendly user interface elements. The software is windows-based software and customers do not need to use any other tool (SAS, SPSS, FICO) but can do the whole model development themselves. PMML is supported and used to move models between Scorto products and third parties. Scorto also offer services to build the models themselves.
Although this is tightly integrated with the other products, Scorto say they have customers using pieces – building models in other tools and deploying them in the platform or just using the modeling tools.
- Supervisor
Supervisor is an OLAP based tool with predefined reports for scorecard monitoring (overrides, system stability), collections (productivity of collectors), Basel II reports etc. It can be connected to third party databases as well as to the Scorto databases and a number of Scorto banking customers are using this for BASEL II reporting.
The forms designer and administration tools round out the product set.
