When people hear FICO mentioned, they typically think of “the credit score company” that determines the magic three-digit number used to help lenders determine a borrower’s ability to repay debt. But the analytics firm also has a robust SaaS (software as a service) business driving its growth, which uses artificial intelligence to assess consumer behavior. 

Although FICO has a long history of using AI and has integrated it throughout all facets of its business, CEO Will Lansing stresses the importance of using it responsibly and spoke with FOX Business about how the company uses the technology – and where it doesn’t.

“The thing we have to be careful about with using AI with credit scores is that it is a very heavily regulated industry, financial services, and everything that we do in terms of granting credit to a consumer has to be understood, has to be explainable, has to be transparent, has to be fair,” Lansing told FOX Business. “And one of the things that happens with AI is it can be quite a black box, and so we are extremely careful to use AI for certain things, and not for other things.”

Much like AI is used in hiring software but is not used to make hiring decisions because of discrimination concerns, AI cannot make the decision on whether a consumer is approved for a purchase such as a car.

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“It’s great for innovation, it’s great for coming up with ideas for variables and models, it’s great for exploring the art of the possible,” he said of AI. “What is not great for is actual production… if you turn a consumer down for in a credit decision, the law requires you to explain why you did it. And to the extent that AI is something of a black box – there’s an explainability challenge there.”

Lansing emphasized FICO does not use AI in its consumer-facing models, but does use it to produce synthetic data to test the robustness of those models, for instance.

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FICO was founded 67 years ago as an analytics consulting firm aimed at solving problems with data. Lansing said the company has been using AI and machine learning for more than 20 years for various purposes.

Roughly half of FICO’s business is on the credit score side, and the other half is its software division, known as the FICO Platform.

The platform uses AI extensively for things like credit card fraud detection, and on the score side, the company uses machine learning to inform them on some analytics.

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“We have to make sure that the models that are ultimately put into production for the benefit of lenders and for the benefit of consumers… that those models are open and fair transparent, and there’s no black box whatsoever,” Lansing explained. “So we’re pioneers in the area of responsible AI, explainable AI, ethical AI. These are things that we focus on because our customers, the banks, are so heavily regulated and they have to explain these things.”

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The Department of Justice (DOJ) on Thursday filed a lawsuit against SpaceX accusing the company of discriminating against asylum seekers and refugees in its hiring decisions.

The DOJ alleges that SpaceX “routinely discouraged asylees and refugees from applying and refused to hire or consider them, because of their citizenship status, in violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).”

According to the suit, SpaceX wrongly claimed that federal regulations restricted the company to only hiring U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents, also known as green card holders.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

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