Banco Santa Cruz Cuts Policy Change Cycles from 90 to 2 Days Using FICO Platform
Dominican Republic's third-largest private bank reduces projected delinquency rates by 65% while achieving 85% faster time-to-market for new products
FICO (NYSE:FICO):
Highlights:
- Banco Santa Cruz reduced policy change cycles from 90 days to 2 days and cut time-to-market for new products by 85%
- Achieved significant projected delinquency rate reductions across credit cards and personal loans through advanced risk modelling
- Banco Santa Cruz has won a 2026 FICO® Decision Award for Cloud Deployment
Banco Santa Cruz, one of the Dominican Republic's largest and fastest-growing private banks, is using the industry-leading capabilities of FICO® Platform to transform its credit decisioning framework across all retail products. The bank migrated from its outdated legacy system to FICO® Platform decisioning capabilities deployed on AWS cloud infrastructure, enabling real-time credit decisions and automated policy management.
The cloud-native solution integrates seamlessly with the bank's existing technology infrastructure, enabling Banco Santa Cruz to shift from a product-centric to a customer-centric origination model. The platform delivers real-time decisions while supporting up to 20,000 online transactions monthly and 50,000 batch operations, allowing consistent decision logic across mobile, branch, and online channels.
More information: https://www.fico.com/en/fico-platform
"Our previous system could take up to 90 days to implement policy changes, which was completely unsuitable for today's dynamic market conditions," said Maribel Concepcion Hidalgo, CRO at Banco Santa Cruz. "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.
From Dependency to Agility: Overcoming Legacy Limitations
Dominican Republic Market faced rising delinquency rates in mid-May 2025, while their fragmented legacy system involved slow manual change processes and dependence on external bureaus for policy logic, leaving business teams without autonomy to test or simulate changes before deployment. With credit demand surging and market competition intensifying from fintech players, the bank needed to strengthen controls while improving speed, personalization, and operational efficiency.
"We were making critical credit decisions based on stale data and static policies," said Concepción. "We needed a system that could think as quickly as our market changes, and that meant our business users taking full control of our decisioning destiny rather than depending on external vendors for our most critical business logic."
Building a Unified Credit Risk Platform
Banco Santa Cruz launched a strategic transformation centered on FICO Platform. The implementation followed a phased approach, starting with credit cards and unsecured personal loans before expanding to mortgages, auto loans, and secured personal loans. The architecture enables champion-challenger testing, automated governance with performance dashboards, and on-demand scalability that grows with business needs.
Built on a PCI-compliant foundation with managed certificates and end-to-end encryption, the platform maintains a 931-millisecond response time baseline across transactions while supporting multi-channel decision orchestration, serving all customer touchpoints consistently. The bank also implemented a simulation tool for prequalification across all unsecured products, shifting from a product-centric to a customer-centric origination model.
"Banco Santa Cruz proves that cloud isn't just about hosting technology, it's about unleashing human potential," said Nikhil Behl, president, software at FICO. "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."
For its achievements, Banco Santa Cruz won a 2026 FICO® Decision Award for Cloud Deployment.
"Banco Santa Cruz didn't just replace a legacy system, they reimagined their entire approach to credit risk management, proving that the right technology architecture can deliver both speed and control simultaneously," said Courtney Haan, strategic product manager for fraud products at Velera and one of the FICO Decision Awards judges.
About Banco Santa Cruz
Banco Santa Cruz is a leading private financial institution in the Dominican Republic, founded in 1999 and now serving more than 600,000 customers across 54 branches. Established as a multiple bank licensed by the Junta Monetaria and supervised by the Superintendencia de Bancos, Banco Santa Cruz operates through an extensive network of branches and ATMs across the country, offering retail and corporate banking, loans, deposits, payment services, and digital banking solutions tailored to meet the needs of its clients. As of 2025, the bank had RD$206,804 million (approximately USD $3.3 billion) in assets and is now the third-largest private multiple-service bank in the country, having climbed from sixth place. The bank is committed to personalized service, transparency, innovation, and sustainable growth, supporting economic development and financial inclusion throughout the Dominican Republic. Over the past 26 years, Banco Santa Cruz has empowered individuals, strengthened communities, and fueled economic growth across the Dominican Republic.
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 to FICO® 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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Thais Sabatini
FICO
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