Approving customer applications in seconds

Volvo Cars has used the cloud-hosted FICO® Platform to digitize and accelerate the customer onboarding process for its new vehicle subscription service, Care by Volvo. By automating the process, Volvo has cut the credit check process on applicants from three days down to seconds.

Care by Volvo is a vehicle subscription service (Mobility-as-a-Service) designed to let customers enjoy the benefits of a new Volvo, without the challenges of owning one. For a fixed monthly fee, Volvo provides subscribers with a brand-new Volvo and covers all regular service, maintenance costs and breakdown cover. The service was introduced to reflect the shift in consumer preference toward car usage and away from absolute ownership.

“When we piloted Care by Volvo in Germany, we used manual credit reference checks, but this took too long and wouldn’t scale as we rolled the program out across Europe and North America,” said Fredrik Nero, product owner at Volvo Cars. “We needed to process applications faster, and approve applications in real time, in line with the Care by Volvo digital vision. Moving to FICO and its cloud-hosted digital decisioning solution gave us the speed and consistency we needed to improve the service and roll it out.”

Volvo adopted various components of the FICO Platform — FICO® Decision Modeler, FICO® Application Studio, FICO® Data Orchestrator Data Acquisition Module — in a cloud-hosted version for maximum efficiency. The solution connects to various external data providers, provides a workflow for managing referred decisions and is integrated with the digital sales channel. It is used for both consumer and business subscribers.

“We now have a single framework to handle third-party data consistently across countries,” said Nero. “This has allowed us to manage our credit policy with a single underwriting team, and yet allow for local market risk needs.”

Care by Volvo achieved its goal of real-time decisions for more than 80 percent of applications, with straight-through processing. As a bonus, the FICO-powered solution is being extended beyond Care by Volvo to all digital sales and new battery electric vehicles as the Volvo Digital journey progresses.

“Volvo Cars is shaping the future of driving and making it possible for more people to get behind the wheel of a Volvo,” said Nikhil Behl, chief marketing officer at FICO. “A single, cloud-hosted platform from FICO is just part of this amazing success story. Congratulations to the Volvo team for their innovation.”

“Harmonization is very difficult as you move to the cloud, and you start to look at the different data streams,” said David Dittmann, vice president, Data & Analytics, P&G and one of the FICO Decisions Awards judges. “Volvo was able to take a manual, fragmented business process, and then centralize it and automate it in real time to make it talk to their backroom applications to make credit decisions. The judges thought Volvo did a great job deploying this system in the cloud across multiple countries.”