Behavioral simulation science for organizations where the cost of unreadiness is too high to measure after the fact.
Criterion Readiness is a behavioral simulation company. We do not measure whether people completed a course. We measure whether they are prepared to perform under pressure in the conditions your organization actually operates in.
The distinction is not philosophical. It is structural. Completion is an activity metric. Readiness is a performance predictor.
Each platform is purpose-built for a specific readiness environment, powered by the same underlying behavioral science.
Behavioral simulation for financial services, healthcare, and law enforcement. Role-based scenario deployment with dimensional profiling and readiness gap analysis at the individual and cohort level.
Explore PlatformA forced-choice behavioral assessment for anyone who makes financial decisions under pressure. Not DISC. Not a personality test. Four dimensions that reveal how you actually behave when money, influence, and risk converge. Athletes, executives, compliance officers, merchants — the instrument applies to all of them.
Learn MorePayment acceptance readiness for merchant operators and financial institution portfolios. Simulated compliance, surcharge, and dispute scenarios that surface real gaps before they generate real losses.
Explore PlatformInstant Wealth Readiness for NIL college athletes and NFL rookies. Financial autonomy and influence susceptibility profiling before first-contract money creates irreversible decisions.
Explore PlatformWhere the cost of unreadiness is regulatory, financial, or human, we build the instruments that measure what training cannot.
"You check the box. The pressure hits. They fail anyway."
The Training Illusion is the business case behind Criterion Readiness. It argues that the $370 billion training industry has been measuring the wrong thing for decades — and what organizations actually need is not better content. It is better proof.
Recognized by the training and development community and cited by Chief People Officers and Chief Staffing Officers navigating the gap between workforce investment and workforce performance.
Assessment and simulation instruments that measure the gap. Operational platforms that close it. One company. One standard.
Instruments that measure behavioral readiness before performance is required. These are the assessment and simulation layer.
Designed for regulated industries where individual decision-making failures carry organizational and legal consequences.
The Criterion Readiness Enterprise platform delivers behavioral simulation for financial services, healthcare, and law enforcement organizations. Unlike traditional LMS platforms that track course completion, CR Enterprise measures whether personnel are actually prepared to perform in the conditions their roles demand.
Role-based simulation scenarios are built from real operational contexts. Compliance officers face real regulatory decision trees. Healthcare staff encounter patient scenario simulations with documented gap identification. Law enforcement personnel complete scenario-based readiness assessments that surface behavioral risks before they become incidents.
Payment acceptance readiness assessment for merchant operators, ISO portfolios, and financial institutions.
PaaS Sim™ Readiness addresses one of the most consequential gaps in merchant services: operators who accept payments without understanding what they have agreed to. Chargebacks, surcharge violations, interchange downgrades, and compliance failures are not fraud problems. They are readiness problems.
The assessment deploys scenario-based readiness simulations covering real acceptance environments: disputed transactions, surcharge edge cases, interchange qualification questions, and PCI compliance decision points. Results produce a readiness gap profile with a targeted action path.
Financial autonomy and behavioral profiling for NIL college athletes and NFL rookies before first-contract decisions.
The data on athlete financial outcomes is not ambiguous. A significant majority of NFL players face financial hardship within two years of retirement. A comparable share of NBA players exhaust their earnings within five years of their final contract. These are not character failures. They are readiness failures, occurring at the intersection of sudden wealth, influence susceptibility, and zero prior financial autonomy.
IWR™ profiles athletes on the four FIRE Scout™ dimensions with interpretations specific to financial decision-making environments, producing individual readiness reports used by agents, athletic directors, compliance departments, and the athletes themselves.
Compliance readiness simulation for financial institution employees. BSA/AML, Reg E, fair lending, and documentation decision scenarios for bank staff and compliance teams.
ReadySim™ Financial addresses the compliance readiness gap inside financial institutions. Where PaaS Sim covers the merchant and operator side of payments, ReadySim Financial covers the bank employees making compliance-critical decisions every day. A missed SAR. A fair lending pattern. A Reg E error. The consequences are existential. Nobody has been simulating the moment — until now.
The platform delivers scenario-based compliance readiness simulation calibrated for tellers, loan officers, compliance officers, and branch managers in regulated banking environments. Results produce a readiness gap profile with targeted intervention paths before a compliance failure produces a regulatory event.
Operational software built for specific industries. These are the tools organizations run on day to day, powered by the same behavioral science foundation.
Full financial readiness platform for NFL rookies and professional athletes entering first-contract wealth environments.
IWR Pro™ is the full-featured platform version of the IWR readiness instrument, built specifically for NFL rookies. Where the readiness assessment identifies the gap, IWR Pro closes it. The platform delivers FIRE Scout™ profiling, personalized financial scenario simulation, and an interactive dashboard that agents, financial advisors, and the athletes themselves use throughout the first-contract period.
IWR Pro addresses the specific vulnerabilities that surface when athletes transition from college programs to professional contracts: investment solicitation, family financial pressure, lifestyle inflation, and contract structure decisions made without sufficient autonomy or discipline.
Financial readiness platform for NIL college athletes managing endorsement income, agent relationships, and early wealth decisions.
NIL changed the financial landscape for college athletes without changing their preparation for it. IWR College™ delivers the FIRE Scout™ behavioral profile and a scenario-based financial platform designed specifically for the NIL environment: endorsement income management, agent vetting, tax exposure awareness, and the influence dynamics that govern early financial decisions in competitive athletic programs.
Athletic directors and compliance departments use IWR College to manage readiness at the program level. Coaches and agents use it at the individual level. Athletes use it to understand their own behavioral profile before the money creates consequences.
Unified hospitality operations platform covering POS, scheduling, HR, LMS, and front-line workforce management.
JOULE Workplace™ is a single-file, full-stack hospitality operations platform built for properties that need POS, workforce scheduling, HR management, and training in one place without enterprise pricing. The platform consolidates functions that most hospitality operators currently run across three to five disconnected tools.
The Criterion Bridge integration brings readiness gating directly into JOULE clock-in, ensuring front-line staff are assessed before they go on shift. That connection between readiness and operations is what separates JOULE Workplace from traditional POS and scheduling tools.
Clinical scenario simulation platform for healthcare organizations that need to measure staff readiness, not just training completion.
FIRE Med Sim™ delivers scenario-based clinical readiness simulation for hospitals, urgent care networks, and healthcare staffing organizations. Where traditional compliance training measures whether clinical staff watched a video, FIRE Med Sim measures whether they can navigate the actual decision environments their roles demand: patient triage scenarios, medication decision trees, documentation requirements under pressure, and interdepartmental communication failures.
The FIRE Scout™ behavioral overlay identifies individual staff members whose Influence Susceptibility or Execution Discipline profiles represent elevated risk in clinical environments before those patterns produce patient safety events.
Complete payment acceptance operations platform for merchant operators, ISOs, and financial institutions managing portfolio compliance at scale.
PaaS Sim™ as a full operational platform goes beyond readiness assessment to deliver active payment acceptance management for merchant portfolios. Where PaaS Sim Readiness identifies the gap, the full platform gives ISOs, acquiring banks, and merchant services teams the operational infrastructure to manage surcharge compliance, dispute workflows, and interchange optimization across their entire portfolio in one place.
The platform is built for the reality of merchant services: operators do not fail because they are dishonest. They fail because the rules are complex, the penalties are asymmetric, and nobody gave them a tool that matched the actual environment they operate in. PaaS Sim closes that gap operationally and at scale.
Learning management system built for regulated industries that need training delivery, completion tracking, and readiness verification in one platform.
JOULE LMSCriterion LMS™#8482; is not a general-purpose learning management system. It is a purpose-built training delivery and readiness verification platform designed for the specific compliance and operational demands of regulated industries. The difference is structural: where generic LMS platforms track whether someone watched a video, Criterion LMS tracks whether they demonstrated the standard.
The Criterion Bridge integration connects LMS completion directly to readiness verification via FIRE Scout™, creating a clock-in gating system that prevents unverified personnel from accessing front-line roles. Training and readiness become two steps in the same workflow rather than two separate systems with no connection between them.
Behavioral and financial readiness for athletes at every level. NIL, professional, and post-career transitions — prepare athletes for decisions money will expose.
The Athlete Readiness Platform delivers FIRE Scout™ behavioral profiling and financial scenario simulation for athletes navigating the pressure environments that surround competitive careers: endorsement decisions, agent relationships, NIL income, first-contract wealth, and post-career financial planning. Most programs prepare athletes for the game. None prepare them for the business of the game.
The platform complements IWR Pro and IWR College with a broader readiness framework that addresses the full athlete financial lifecycle — from college NIL through professional contracts to post-career transitions.
Clinical readiness intelligence for sports medicine and regenerative medicine practitioners. Protocol adherence, return-to-play, and patient decision scenario simulation.
Performance Medicine Readiness delivers behavioral simulation for sports medicine physicians, athletic trainers, physical therapists, and regenerative medicine practitioners. The platform covers the decision environments where clinical readiness gaps most frequently produce adverse outcomes: return-to-play protocol adherence, regenerative treatment patient selection, and athlete communication under coaching and organizational pressure.
The FIRE Scout™ Influence Susceptibility overlay identifies practitioners whose decision-making is disproportionately shaped by coaching staff, team management, or athlete pressure — before those patterns produce a patient safety event or regulatory exposure.
Sales and service readiness simulation for retail operators. Customer interaction, objection handling, return procedures, and POS decision scenarios.
Retail Sales Sim delivers scenario-based sales readiness for retail environments where customer-facing performance directly determines revenue, margin, and customer retention. The platform identifies the Influence Susceptibility and Execution Discipline gaps that separate retail associates who convert from those who do not — before those gaps show up in your comps.
The all-in-one hospitality operations platform. POS, inventory, scheduling, HR, LMS, and optional payment integration in a single browser-based SaaS. Built to complete and sell.
JOULE Workplace is a complete hospitality operations platform built for independent operators, franchise groups, and multi-location hospitality businesses that need enterprise capability without enterprise pricing. The platform consolidates five to seven tools the average operator runs separately — and eliminates the integration costs, training overhead, and data silos that come with them.
JOULE Workplace is a SaaS product in active development, designed to be sold as a standalone subscription to hospitality operators. The Criterion Bridge integration makes it the only hospitality platform on the market with behavioral readiness gating built directly into the clock-in workflow.
A forced-choice behavioral assessment for anyone who makes financial decisions under pressure. Not a personality test. Not DISC. Four dimensions that reveal how you actually behave when money, influence, and risk are all in the room at once.
FIRE Scout™ was built to answer one question: how does a person actually behave when money, pressure, and consequence arrive at the same time? Not how they think they behave. Not how they present themselves. How they actually decide.
The four dimensions are not personality traits and they are not career archetypes. They are behavioral patterns with direct predictive value in any environment where financial decisions carry real weight. That means athletes facing first-contract wealth. It means compliance officers navigating regulatory pressure. It means merchants managing surcharge decisions they do not fully understand. It means executives allocating capital under board scrutiny. The instrument does not change. The environment does.
The forced-choice format makes self-presentation impossible. Every prompt requires a choice between two equally plausible options. There is no right answer to optimize for. The instrument surfaces behavioral truth because it gives respondents nowhere to hide.
NFL rookies, NIL college athletes, and professional players entering first-contract wealth environments where influence and spending decisions have permanent consequences.
Compliance officers, financial advisors, and regulatory staff whose Influence Susceptibility and Execution Discipline profiles directly predict procedural adherence and documentation fidelity under pressure.
Leaders making capital allocation, acquisition, and investment decisions under board pressure. Risk Appetite and Financial Autonomy scores carry direct predictive value for capital decision quality.
Merchant operators managing surcharge compliance, dispute decisions, and interchange complexity. The instrument identifies operators whose behavioral profile predicts compliance failure before it produces losses.
Clinical personnel whose Execution Discipline and Influence Susceptibility profiles predict protocol adherence, documentation accuracy, and escalation decision quality in patient-facing roles.
If you make financial decisions under pressure — personal or professional — FIRE Scout™ tells you how you actually behave in those moments. Not how you think you do. How you do.
The degree to which a person exercises independent financial judgment rather than deferring to external authorities, peer pressure, or default inertia. High FA individuals make financial decisions on their own terms. Low FA individuals defer — to advisors, to peers, to whoever is loudest in the room. Both patterns are measurable before they produce consequences.
The degree to which financial decisions are shaped by social pressure, authority signals, and relational obligations rather than independent analysis. High IS scores predict vulnerability to investment pitches, entourage-driven spending, sales pressure, and any environment where someone else benefits from moving your money. This dimension applies equally to athletes, executives, compliance officers, and merchants.
Calibrated tolerance for uncertainty and downside scenarios across both voluntary risk-seeking and involuntary risk-blindness. Uncalibrated risk appetite in either direction produces predictable failure. Too high: reckless capital decisions, compliance shortcuts, investment speculation. Too low: paralysis, missed opportunities, deference to safer-looking but worse options. The instrument measures both ends.
The degree to which a person completes complex, multi-step financial processes with fidelity under ambiguity, pressure, or competing priorities. High ED individuals follow through. Low ED individuals start strong and do not finish. In financial environments this distinction separates people who actually implement a plan from people who agree to one. The gap between those two groups is where money disappears.
Most behavioral instruments let respondents pick the best-looking answer. FIRE Scout™ does not. Every prompt pairs two equally plausible behavioral options. Neither reads as obviously correct. The respondent has to choose — and that choice, made without a clearly right answer available, reveals genuine behavioral tendency rather than preferred self-presentation.
DISC and its derivatives measure personality style. They tell you how someone prefers to communicate, what energizes them, how they like to work. That is useful for team building. It does not tell you how someone behaves when fifty thousand dollars is on the line, when an advisor is pushing a product, or when a compliance deadline collides with a client relationship.
FIRE Scout™ was built for the second problem. The assessment is untimed because time pressure distorts behavioral signal and creates test anxiety rather than authentic pattern. The instrument needs to surface what someone actually does — not how fast they can perform under artificial stress.
Paired behavioral statements in contexts designed to surface authentic decision tendencies. No option reads as superior. The respondent cannot optimize for a preferred profile. The instrument closes every escape route toward self-presentation.
Responses are scored across all four FIRE dimensions independently. No dimension is inherently good or bad. A high Risk Appetite score is not a problem for a venture investor and is a serious problem for a pension fund compliance officer. Context determines meaning.
The same four scores mean different things in different environments. An athlete report interprets Financial Autonomy through spending and agent relationship decisions. An executive report interprets it through capital allocation. A merchant report interprets it through compliance decisions. The instrument is universal. The interpretation is precise.
Every report ends with a readiness gap profile and a specific action path. The gap is not a grade. It is a map. It tells the individual and their administrator exactly where behavioral risk lives and what to do about it before that risk produces a real financial consequence.
We were built on a single conviction: the gap between training completion and actual readiness is where organizations fail, and that gap is measurable.
"The training industry measures what it can count. We measure what actually matters."
Criterion Readiness was founded out of a specific frustration with how organizations approach workforce preparedness. The existing infrastructure, from LMS platforms to compliance training suites, was built to generate completion records. It was not built to produce readiness.
The distinction sounds academic until an organization experiences a compliance failure, a clinical error, a financial loss, or an athlete who ran out of money two years after signing a contract worth eight figures. In every one of those cases, someone had completed the required training. No one had measured their readiness.
We built Criterion Readiness to solve that problem with precision, not with another content library.
We do not recommend solutions before we understand the gap. Every engagement begins with the instrument, not the answer.
Generic readiness tools produce generic readiness data. Every platform we build is purpose-engineered for the operational environment it serves.
Our instruments surface behavioral truth, not preferred self-image. The forced-choice format exists for a reason.
A readiness gap profile is only valuable if it produces a clear action path. Our reports always end with direction, not just data.
Kelly Terracio leads Criterion Readiness as Chief Executive Officer and the architect of its simulation methodology. She brings deep expertise in behavioral assessment design, AI-driven simulation architecture, and enterprise platform development across financial services, compliance, and athlete readiness environments. Kelly is co-founder of DataNav Solutions, the parent company, where she also serves as CEO.
Justin Terracio drives strategy, growth architecture, and operational execution for Criterion Readiness. As Chief Strategy and Growth Officer, he leads market positioning, partner development, and the operational infrastructure supporting multi-vertical platform deployment. Justin is co-founder of DataNav Solutions, where he also serves as Chief Operating Officer.
Criterion Readiness operates as a standalone platform company under DataNav Solutions, a Nashville-based consulting, SaaS, and publishing company. DataNav's portfolio also includes JOULE Workplace (hospitality operations), PaaS by Payments as a Service, and IT and M&A consulting at datanavsolutions.com.
Tell us about your readiness environment. We will tell you which platform applies and what the gap measurement looks like in your context.
Every engagement begins with a consultation to understand your operating environment, the roles you need to assess, and the readiness outcomes that matter to your organization. We do not sell software before we understand the problem.