Climate Crunch & Credit Crunch - Corporate Social Responsibility

Darcy Sullivan interviews Laurent Pacalin, Fair Isaacs Chief Marketing Officer, on the companys Corporate Social Responsibility initiative. We believe that it is a strategic imperative for businesses in the 21st century to have a positive impact on society. Over the years Fair Isaac has had a positive impact by establishing a standard credit scoring service weve enabled equal opportunity banking. But we wanted to do more and look beyond what we did as a financial services software vendor. That is to say to be better not only at what we do but also examine how we do it. You see, we are interested in achieving economic, environmental and social success. The sustainability thought leader Andy Savitz calls this the triple bottom line. As the co-founder of the Clean Tech Open, the most successful clean tech business plan competition in the nation, Ive invested a lot of time researching how businesses can minimize their use of natural resources Its a journey that requires unleashing the genie of the AND and eradicating the demon of the OR. It means you dont have to choose between doing something thats right for the business OR something thats right for society and the environment. You can do both. This is something I strongly believe in. Now, as an industry leader, we take it upon ourselves to solve really big problems. In the context of Fair Isaac the big problems that we can tackle are what Id call the Climate Crunch and the Credit Crunch. The office and IT are becoming major drivers of climate change. Let me try to illustrate this point. By 2020, McKinsey predicted that IT would be the cause of 1.5 gigatons of greenhouse gases. This means that the carbon footprint of IT would be comparable to that of aviation. Weve recently announced a Sustainable Enterprise Initiative to focus on reducing Fair Isaacs carbon footprint. This initiative is led by our CIO, Christopher Rence, and supported by our employees. It is focused on three key areas: 1.Greening our data centers by improving the energy efficiency of our IT infrastructure. 2.Reducing employee commute miles by encouraging telecommuting 3.Decreasing overall printing and using post-consumer paper wherever possible Yes, taken together, these efforts are expected to meaningfully reduce Fair Isaac's greenhouse gas emissions. Specifically, by 2010, Fair Isaac plans to cut the amount of power needed to run its information technology systems by 50 percent and reduce its printing output by 80 percent. Our contribution to alleviating the credit crunch has two components. First, we have a number of initiatives aimed at giving lenders better tools to administer and grant loans. But what Id like to talk about here is what were doing for consumers. Our objective is to empower the consumer through better financial education. For example, through myFICO.com, we make available for free a wide range of valuable educational material about credit so that consumers can be empowered to take control of their financial lives. We work with the news media day in and day out to extend that credit information out into the world, so that as many people as possible can take advantage of it. And we work with organizations like the Consumer Federation of America to provide their constituents with valuable credit education. One of the most exciting things is that we are planning to extend our FICO Scores on Statements program. This is a program where a bank can give its customers their FICO score for free on their monthly online banking statement. Its a great way for a bank to help its customers understand their financial picture and track it on a monthly basis.

» View the original video «

YouTube | December 5, 2008

Tags:. .eradicating. .darcy. .vendor. .genie. .cofounder