Santander Consumer USA received more than just an auto-finance applicant’s credit score and risk assessment from FICO.

At the FICO World Conference on Wednesday, FICO announced Santander has won a 2025 FICO Decisions Award for its use of machine learning.

Officials highlighted SCUSA has transformed its credit risk assessment processes using FICO Platform and its applied analytics and machine learning capabilities.

Santander manages a $60 billion asset portfolio and serves more than three million customers using FICO to streamline model development, improve governance, and enhance predictive analytics in response to evolving market conditions.

“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 U.S. auto business and CEO of Santander Consumer USA.

Santander is using FICO to empower consumer credit risk in three primary functions:

—Approving or declining credit applicants

—Assigning adverse action

—Assessing the probability of default for use in pricing models.

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, FICO said 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.”

The FICO Decisions Awards recognize organizations that are achieving remarkable success using FICO solutions. Joe McKendrick is an analyst and senior contributor at Forbes and one of the FICO Decision Awards judges.

“What impressed me was how Santander transformed a slow, manual process into a seamless, real-time system,” McKendrick said. “It didn’t just tweak its risk models—Santander overhauled how it makes decisions, making them faster, smarter, and more reliable.”

To see the full list of 2025 FICO Decisions Awards winners, check out https://www.fico.com/en/decisionawards.