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 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.
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With mathematical optimization, Erste Group enabled individualized pricing at scale, while significantly reducing manual exceptions, and experienced a 22% profit increase.
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.”
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