FICO announced a new platform deployment with Banco Santa Cruz, a leading private bank in the Dominican Republic, after the bank announced the deal on March 25, 2026. The deployment will reduce policy‑change cycles from 90 days to 2 days and cut time‑to‑market for new products by 85%.
The deal expands FICO’s Platform footprint into the Caribbean, adding a high‑volume customer that will help the company demonstrate the stickiness of its cloud‑native, SaaS‑based decisioning engine. The partnership is expected to generate recurring revenue and serve as a reference for future deployments in emerging markets.
Banco Santa Cruz, founded in 1999 and serving over 600,000 customers, has long been a digital‑innovation leader in the Dominican Republic. The bank’s legacy system was limited by slow policy updates and manual compliance workflows. By adopting FICO’s Platform, the bank can now test and implement new strategies in days, giving it a competitive edge in a market where other banks are still reliant on legacy infrastructure.
"Our previous system could take up to 90 days to implement policy changes, which was completely unsuitable for today’s dynamic market conditions. We needed a decisioning architecture that could respond in real‑time to changes, while giving our business teams autonomy to test and implement quickly. Moving to FICO Platform has given us the strength and agility to interact positively in a dynamic and changing environment," said Maribel Concepcion Hidalgo, CRO at Banco Santa Cruz.
Nikhil Behl, president of software at FICO, emphasized the strategic significance of the deal: "Banco Santa Cruz proves that cloud isn’t just about hosting technology, it’s about unleashing human potential. Their teams went from waiting months for policy changes to testing new strategies in days. That’s the difference between reacting to market changes and anticipating them. Cloud‑native decisioning doesn’t just make you faster, it makes you smarter." The partnership underscores FICO’s broader shift toward a cloud‑native, SaaS‑heavy model, with the Platform already recognized as a leader by Gartner and Forrester.
The deal also highlights the growing demand for AI‑driven decisioning in the financial services sector, as banks seek to accelerate product launches, improve risk management, and meet regulatory compliance requirements. With the Platform’s composable ecosystem, Banco Santa Cruz can unify data ingestion, feature engineering, model development, decision orchestration, and workflow automation, positioning the bank for faster growth in a competitive regional landscape.
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