Leading financial services provider in Central and Eastern Europe uses AI-powered decision optimization across products and areas from lending to collections
Erste Group Bank AG, the leading financial services provider in Central and Eastern Europe, has deployed optimization technology from FICO (NYSE: FICO) to enhance its customized pricing and limit strategies in order to offer tailored and more flexible financing terms. Customers benefit from optimization for mortgages, cash loans and other retail products. This project has earned Erste Group Bank a 2026 FICO Decision Award for AI, Machine Learning Optimization.
More information: https://www.fico.com/en/platform/enterprise-optimization
The journey of mathematical optimization within Erste Group has been unfolding for nearly 14 years. Since then, Erste Group has been rolling out optimized strategies across decision areas and products. Mathematical optimization enhances traditional pricing approaches that relied primarily on expert judgment.
Mathematically optimized pricing for loans supports the bank's risk management and business by enabling limits to be set more accurately than through human judgement alone. This not only allows the bank to make more precise and flexible financing decisions for its customers, it also strengthens measures to prevent over-indebtedness. When applying mathematical optimization, protecting customer data is a key priority for Erste Group. Mathematical optimization models rely solely on the financial parameters of each financing case and do not use any personal customer data.
One project that has benefitted from the use of FICO Decision Optimizer is pricing for small business unsecured installment loans. The original setup relied heavily on manual decision making-nearly 90% of loan pricing was driven by branch-level price exceptions. By combining machine learning models that predict individual client behavior (take-up, prepayment, and risk) with mathematical optimization, Erste Group enabled individualized pricing at scale, while significantly reducing manual exceptions, and experienced a 22% profit increase.
The implementation of FICO's mathematical optimization across Erste Group has also delivered measurable improvements for its clients. For the bank, it aligned with its strategic goals of strengthening profitability, customer satisfaction, and operational efficiency. This ensures a mutually beneficial outcome for both the client and the bank.
To expand its success with FICO optimization, the banking group created an Optimization Expert role to guide selected bank analysts through the entire optimization process. This includes sharing know-how, supporting data preparation, leading the development of component models, helping to build complete solutions with FICO optimization, and assisting with deployment and evaluation.
"Erste Group Bank has consistently innovated in its use of mathematical optimization to power smarter decisions," said Nikhil Behl, president, software at FICO. "They have proven results in multiple areas, demonstrating their excellence and the gains that this technology provides across the enterprise. FICO considers them one of the most advanced users of optimization in retail banking today."
For its achievements, Erste Group Bank AG won a 2026 FICO Decision Award for AI, Machine Learning Optimization
"The judging panel was impressed by how Erste Group Bank extended results from one country to multiple regions," said Shrimanth Adla, senior director, credit risk strategy and analytics, Comcast, and one of the FICO Decision Awards judges. "They have made AI-powered strategies into an analytic advantage."
About Erste Group Bank AG
Erste Group is the leading financial services provider in the eastern part of the EU. Its ca. 55,000 employees serve around 23 million customers across 8 core markets (Austria, Croatia, Czechia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Serbia, and Slovakia), including through over 2,100 branches. Founded in 1819 as the first savings bank in Austria, Erste Group went public in 1997 with a strategy to expand across Central and Eastern Europe. For over 200 years, Erste has been committed to creating prosperity for its customers with a wide range of products and personalised services. For more information, please visit:
www.erstegroup.com
About the FICO Decision Awards
The FICO Decision 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 2026 judges are:
- Sam Abadir,research director, risk compliance, IDC Financial Insights
- Shrimanth Adla,senior director, credit risk strategy and analytics, Comcast
- Manoj Agrawal,group editor, Banking Frontiers
- Courtney Haan,strategic product manager for fraud products, Velera (Previous Winner)
- Shelly Kramer,principal analyst at Kramer Company and theCube Research
- Andy Lawrie,credit risk tech lead at Nationwide Building Society (Previous Winner)
- Lisa Morgan,technology journalist and contributor at InformationWeek
- Déborah Oliveira, founder and editor-in-chief at IT Forum
The winners of the FICO Decision Awards will be spotlighted at and win tickets toFICO World 2026, May 19-22, 2026, at the Signia By Hilton hotel, Orlando, 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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