Digitalization is dramatically changing the world, especially for Financial Services. Having to go inside a branch to schedule a meeting with a finance or mortgage expert is so yesterday. Service, convenience, security and analytics through all channels.

During this week in Washington D.C., Cisco is joining the world's thought leaders and business experts at FICO World 2016.  It's quite a meaty agenda covering areas from analytics innovation, customer experience, regulatory compliance, fraud, security and many more.

I am particularly interested in the latest innovations in data and analytics where performance is key and results are needed in real time. In fact, FICO is using Cisco Unified Computing System to help financial services firms achieve their analytics goals. FICO challenges the status quo by providing an easy and cost-effective way for businesses to create fully customizable analytically powered applications, explore big data, uncover insights, use analytics for operational decisions, create and deliver web and mobile apps, and track and improve analytic models and decision strategies.

The world is becoming increasingly reliant on getting real-time insights from data, whether it's location-based analytics like traffic flow, balk and dwell times and device counts to understand and predict customer behavior within bank branches. Much of this data is generated in places it wasn't before, which means you have to deploy access points or do analytics in places you didn't before.

Data is totally useless without insight and action. The ability to query billions of data records instantly and get the resulting insights to drive informed decision making requires new technical capabilities to deliver the best experiences customers that business partners and employees expect.

FICO is a great Cisco partner, committed to analytics innovation and we're excited to be part of their digital business transformation journey, leveraging analytics as a competitive advantage. To learn more on how Cisco and FICO are helping financial services firms, please look here. And if you are at FICO World, we look forward to seeing you there!