Santander’s US Auto Business Wins 2025 FICO Decisions Award for Machine Learning Credit Risk Analysis

At its FICO® World conference today, global analytics software leader, FICO announced that the Santander US Auto business, one of the largest auto lenders in the U.S., has won a 2025 FICO® Decisions Award for its use of machine learning. The business has transformed its credit risk assessment processes using FICO® Platform and its applied analytics and machine learning capabilities. Santander, which manages a $60 billion asset portfolio and serves over three million customers, is using FICO Platform to streamline model development, improve governance, and enhance predictive analytics in response to evolving market conditions. 

For more information on FICO Platform, visit: https://www.fico.com/en/fico-platform.

 “The FICO team has been instrumental in enabling the Auto business to use a unified platform to be more efficient and accelerate our timelines. FICO helped our modeling team reduce the number of tasks, allowing for our data team to focus on interpreting the analytics,” said Bruce Jackson, head of the Santander US Auto Business and CEO of Santander Consumer. 

Santander is using FICO Platform to empower consumer credit risk in three primary functions: approving or declining credit applicants, assigned adverse action, and assessing the probability of default for use in pricing models. This allows the business to assess more applications for auto loans. The platform allows Santander to deploy machine learning and advanced analytics to drive business decisions and get new predictive models and strategies into production to keep pace with changing customer and market dynamics. 

With rising interest rates and increased vehicle prices impacting affordability, Santander needed a more agile risk assessment framework. Legacy tools required manual, time-consuming recalibrations, delaying credit analysis and limiting the ability to respond quickly to market shifts. 

“Santander’s adoption of machine learning is an example of how lenders can modernize credit risk analysis,” said Nikhil Behl, president of software at FICO. “Building a model more efficiently is imperative in today’s competitive market. Santander’s success in streamlining processes, reducing manual efforts, and gaining real-time insights into credit risk sets a strong benchmark for the industry.”

“What impressed me was how Santander transformed a slow, manual process into a seamless, real-time system,” said Joe McKendrick, analyst and senior contributor at Forbes and one of the FICO Decision Awards judges. “It didn’t just tweak its risk models—Santander overhauled how it makes decisions, making them faster, smarter, and more reliable.” 

For its achievements, Santander Consumer USA has won a 2025 FICO® Decisions Award for AI, Machine Learning & Optimization. To see the full list of 2025 FICO Decisions Awards winners, check out: https://www.fico.com/en/decisionsawards