Current Job of Surjit Singh

In May 1998, I took up a job at HNC.

When my son, Jaideep got a full academic scholarship to study at Caltech and moved to Pasadena, all of us missed him. So, I applied for jobs in California. Almost got post-docs at Caltech, UCSD and at some colleges for teaching. But then I remembered Raj Kumar Pathria telling me that his son and younger daughter worked at a company in San Diego. I decided to check it out. I visited many Dilbertian cubicles and talked to many people. I was very encouraged to see that they were dressed without jackets and ties, and had books like Abramowitz and Stegun and Numerical Recipes in Fortran on their desks. They said they were doing applied mathematics to solve problems in financial fraud. I thought it might be fun, applied, got interviewed and joined. HNC makes a credit card fraud detection product, which is by far the major product used by credit card issuers to detect the use of lost/stolen credit cards all over the world.

In April 2002, the company was taken over by Fair, Isaac. This company created and sells the famous FICO score. Whenever you apply for credit (for buying a house, car or even insurance), the lenders obtain the industry standard FICO score. In fact, you can check your own FICO score and learn how to improve it at the myFICO website right now.