Risk Factors - FICO

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Item 1A. Risk Factors

Business, Market and Strategy Risks

We may not be successful in executing the business strategy for our Software segment, which could cause our growth prospects and results of operations to suffer.

We have increasingly focused our Software segment’s business strategy on investing significant development resources to enable substantially all of our software to run on FICO® Platform, our modular software offering designed to enable advanced analytics and decisioning use cases. This business strategy is designed to enable us to increase our business by selling multiple connectable and extensible products to clients, as well as to enable the development of custom client solutions and to allow our clients to more easily expand their usage and the use cases they enable over time. The market may be unreceptive to our general business approach, including being unreceptive to our cloud-based offerings, unreceptive to purchasing multiple products from us, or unreceptive to our customized solutions. As we continue to pursue this business strategy, we may experience volatility in our Software segment’s revenues and operating results caused by various factors, including the differences in revenue recognition treatment and timing between our cloud-based offerings and on-premises software licenses, the timing of investments and other expenditures necessary to develop and operate our cloud-based offerings, and the adoption of new sales, delivery and distribution methods. If this business strategy is not successful, we may not be able to grow our Software segment’s business, growth may occur more slowly than we anticipate, or revenues and profits may decline.

We derive a substantial portion of our revenues from a small number of products and services, and if the market does not continue to accept these products and services, our revenues will decline.

We expect that revenues derived from our scoring solutions, fraud solutions, customer communication services, customer management solutions and decision management software will continue to account for a substantial portion of our total revenues for the foreseeable future. Our revenues will decline if the market does not continue to accept these products and services. Factors that might affect the market acceptance of these products and services include the following:

•changes in the business analytics industry;

•changes in technology;

•our inability to obtain or use key data for our products;

•saturation or contraction of market demand;

•loss of key customers;

•industry consolidation;

•failure to successfully adopt cloud-based technologies;

•our inability to obtain regulatory approvals for our products and services, including credit score models;

•the increasing availability of free or relatively inexpensive consumer credit, credit score and other information from public or commercial sources;

•failure to execute our selling approach; and

•inability to successfully sell our products in new vertical markets.

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If we are unable to successfully develop new products or new versions of products, or if we experience defects, failures or delays associated with the introduction of new products or of new versions of products, our business could suffer serious harm.

Our growth and the success of our business strategy depend upon our ability to develop and sell new products and new versions of products, including the development and sale of our cloud-based product offerings and our scoring solutions. If we are unable to develop new or enhanced products, or if we are not successful in introducing new or enhanced products, we may not be able to grow our business or growth may occur more slowly than we anticipate. In addition, significant undetected errors or delays in new products or new versions of products may affect market acceptance of our products and could harm our business, financial condition or results of operations. In the past, we have experienced delays while developing and introducing new products and product enhancements, primarily due to difficulties developing models, acquiring data, and adapting to particular software operating environments and certain client or other systems. We have also experienced errors or “bugs” in our software products, despite testing prior to release of the products. Software errors in our products could affect the ability of our products to work with other hardware or software products, could delay the development or release of new products or new versions of products, and could adversely affect market acceptance of our products. Errors or defects in our products that are significant, or are perceived to be significant, could result in rejection of our products, damage to our reputation, loss of revenues, diversion of development resources, an increase in product liability claims, and increases in service and support costs and warranty claims.

Our ability to increase our revenues will depend to some extent upon introducing new products and services and upon introducing enhancements and improvements to existing products and services. If the marketplace does not accept these new, enhanced or improved products and services, our revenues may decline.

To increase our revenues, we must enhance and improve existing products and services, and continue to introduce new products and services that keep pace with technological developments, satisfy increasingly sophisticated customer requirements and achieve market acceptance. We believe much of the future growth of our business and the success of our business strategy will rest on our ability to continue to expand into newer markets for our products and services. Such areas are relatively new to our product development and sales and marketing personnel. Products and services that we plan to market in the future are in various stages of development. We cannot assure you that the marketplace will accept these products and services. If our current or potential customers are not willing to switch to or adopt our new products and services, either as a result of the quality of these products and services or due to other factors, such as economic conditions, our revenues will decrease.

We rely on relatively few customers, as well as our contracts with the three major consumer reporting agencies, for a significant portion of our revenues and profits. Many of our customers are significantly larger than we are and may have greater bargaining power. The businesses of our largest customers depend, in large part, on favorable macroeconomic conditions. If these customers are negatively impacted by weak global economic conditions, global economic volatility or the terms of these relationships otherwise change, our revenues and operating results could decline.

Most of our customers are relatively large enterprises, such as banks, credit card issuers, insurers, retailers, telecommunications providers, automotive lenders, consumer reporting agencies, public agencies, and organizations in other industries. As a result, many of our customers and potential customers are significantly larger than we are and may have sufficient bargaining power to demand reduced prices and favorable nonstandard terms.

In addition, the U.S. and other key international economies have periodically experienced downturns in which economic activity is impacted by falling demand for a variety of goods and services, increased volatility of interest rates, fluctuating rates of inflation, restricted credit, poor liquidity, reduced corporate profitability, volatility in credit, equity and foreign exchange markets, bankruptcies and overall uncertainty with respect to the economy. The potential for economic disruption presents considerable risks to our business, including potential bankruptcies or credit deterioration of financial institutions with which we have substantial relationships. Economic disruption could result in a decline in the sales of new products to our customers and the volume of transactions that we execute for existing customers. In addition, the volume of our Scores sales depends heavily on macroeconomic conditions, including, for example, the volume of transactions in the U.S. mortgage and credit card markets, which account for a significant portion of the revenues in our Scores segment.

We also derive a substantial portion of our Scores segment revenues and operating income from our contracts with the three major consumer reporting agencies in the U.S., Experian, TransUnion and Equifax, and other parties that distribute our products to certain markets. The loss of or a significant change in a relationship with one of the three consume