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What Is Your DEI Strategy?

Inclusive Recruitment

Christabel James | DEI Lead, RiskSpan

Christabel James

*This post by RiskSpan’s Christabel James was originally published in February 2022 by the Structured Finance Association.


Companies that have implemented intentional diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies and strategies have not only a great and inclusive corporate culture, but also increased employee retention, productivity, quality of decision making – all of which positively impact the bottom-line.

Building a strong, diverse, and inclusive culture starts with recruitment, the beginning of the employee life cycle.

What does it mean to be inclusive in recruitment? Why is inclusive recruitment important? How can we proactively implement inclusive recruitment practices? Read on to find out how inclusive recruitment cannot only strengthen you DEI policies but be a powerful tool that helps shape the culture, the bottom line, and perceived value of the company.


What is inclusive recruitment?

While it seems like machines are replacing most jobs, people continue to be an organization’s most valuable asset. There is not denying that the quality of a company’s human resources, and their active engagement, continues to drive business performance. Research from Gallup has shown that disengaged employees cost companies $450-to-$550 billion in lost productivity annually. Given, this, recruitment is the first step to attracting bright and diverse talent, encouraging not only diversity but also increased engagement and inclusiveness.

Inclusive recruitment recognizes that diverse talent exists and employs practical, intentional tools to not only attract, but also level the playing field for this talent and in the process removes unconscious biases and discriminations that plague traditional processes. Inclusive recruitment ensures that candidates are hired based on their skills, abilities, and expertise, and not based on their characteristics or background.  


Why is inclusive recruitment important? 

It’s no surprise that hiring a diverse workforce that brings in potentially diverse thought leadership is critical in today’s competitive business landscape. While companies are bound by law to treat every candidate equally, what is also important for businesses is the impact that their corporate culture has on the branding of their organization. A company whose culture emphasizes diversity and inclusion signals greater acceptance of diverse talent, thereby attracting a larger, more diverse talent pool, all of which positively impact not only the company’s bottom-line, but also, its reputation. According to Pew Research Center, millennials are the largest generation in the US workforce and in a research by the Read More


RiskSpan and Verisk Collaborate to Offer Climate Risk Analytics for Mortgage Finance

Mortgage analytics firm RiskSpan has collaborated with Verisk to create a first-of-its-kind solution for measuring and mitigating the risks of climate change to the housing finance industry. The collaboration unites RiskSpan’s Edge Platform for mortgage analytics with Verisk Extreme Event  Solutions’ proven set of models — relied on by leading insurance, re-insurance, corporate and government entities, to assess the risk from natural catastrophes and climate to a given location by providing a property-specific hazard risk metric.Verisk

“Verisk’s ground-up approach to property-specific risk analysis is the perfect complement to our loan-level approach to mortgage credit and prepayment modeling,” said Janet Jozwik, the managing director heading up RiskSpan’s contribution to the new partnership. “We are excited to layer Verisk’s unique property risk scoring into our existing credit and portfolio risk framework.”

“Our collaboration with RiskSpan will serve to greatly benefit the housing finance industry by adding critical data and analytics from Verisk’s catastrophe models during the loan screening process,” observed Roger Grenier, senior vice president of Verisk’s global resilience practice. “This added layer of portfolio management can help banks and financial institutions better understand the potential risk from extreme weather events to a given property.”

The risk to the housing finance industry from extreme events is significant. According to Verisk, 62 million residential locations are at moderate to extreme risk of flooding alone.

“We are thrilled to bring the powerful climate and hazard risk analytics of Verisk to our clients,” said Bernadette Kogler, chief executive officer, RiskSpan. “This alliance opens the door to a world of property-level data from the insurance industry that can have tremendous value for applications in the mortgage space.”

“The collaborative solution will bring together the best extreme event models, data and climate analytics to the mortgage finance industry,” concluded Bill Churney, president, Verisk’s Extreme Event Solutions unit. “With financial institutions facing increased pressure to factor climate risk into their decision making, we expect RiskSpan’s enhanced tools powered by Verisk to be a welcome addition to their risk management process.”

The collaboration offers two complementary products, including loan-level scoring and climate stress testing, with applications for loan screening, portfolio management, and financial disclosures.


About RiskSpan 

RiskSpan offers end-to-end solutions for data management, risk management analytics, and visualization on a highly secure, fast, and fully scalable platform that has earned the trust of the industry’s largest firms. Combining the strength of subject matter experts, quantitative analysts, and technologists, RiskSpan’s Edge Platform integrates a range of data-sets – structured and unstructured – and off-the-shelf analytical tools to provide you with powerful insights and a competitive advantage. Learn more at www.riskspan.com. 

About Extreme Event Solutions at Verisk

Extreme event solutions at Verisk (formerly AIR Worldwide) provides risk modeling solutions that help individuals, businesses, and society become more resilient to extreme events. In 1987, Verisk founded the catastrophe modeling industry and today models the risk from natural catastrophes, supply chain disruptions, terrorism, pandemics, casualty catastrophes, and cyber incidents. Insurance, reinsurance, financial, corporate, and government clients rely on Verisk’s advanced science, software, and consulting services for catastrophe risk management, insurance-linked securities, longevity modeling, site-specific engineering analyses, and agricultural risk management. Verisk’s extreme event solutions team is headquartered in Boston, with additional offices in North America, Europe, and Asia. For more information, please visit www.air-worldwide.com. For more information about Verisk, a leading data analytics provider serving customers in insurance, energy and specialized markets, and financial services, please visit www.verisk.com.

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Webinar: Geocoding Mortgage Data for ESG and Climate Risk Analysis

Recorded: February 16th | 1:00 p.m. ET

Geocoding remains a particularly vexing challenge for the mortgage industry. Lenders, servicers, and loan/MSR investors know the addresses of the properties securing their mortgage assets. But most data pertaining to climate and other ESG considerations is available only by matching to a census tract or latitude/longitude.

And if you have ever tried mapping addresses, you know this exercise can be a lot harder than it looks. Fortunately, a growing body of geocoding tools and techniques is emerging to make the process more manageable than ever, even with less than perfect address data.

Our panel presents a how-to guide on geocoding logic and its specific application to the mortgage space. You will learn a useful waterfall approach for linking census-tract-level, geo-specific data for climate risk and ESG to the property addresses in your portfolio.

 

Featured Speakers

Suhrud Dagli

Chief Innovation Officer, RiskSpan

Jason Huang

Manager, RiskSpan

Jason Lee

Software Engineer, RiskSpan


Institutionally Focused Broker-Dealer: Product Service

As a new MBS operation, this institutional broker-dealer needed trade capture and analytics functionality, particularly for risk management purposes. The broker-dealer also required an application to track MBS pass-through positions in real-time, given the active trading style of its pass-through desk (an average of 3 trades per minute).

The Solution

The client adopted the Edge Platform and RiskSpan provided custom development services that included:

  • A real-time  pass-through matrix  Start-of-Day/ Intra-day firm-wide position upload (taking a feed from a proprietary books-and-records system)
  • Real-time trade capture from Bloomberg and internal sources

The pass-though desk actively used the pass-through matrix for several years. When the client developed its own internal solution, it continued using the Edge Platform to run daily risk scenarios on the firm’s positions.

Total development time for all these projects was about 6 weeks.


National Property and Casualty Insurance Carrier : Claims Platform Migration

A national property and casualty insurance carrier was struggling with an antiquated claims platform. Built on the IBM AS400 Mainframe system, the existing platform was unable to scale up to the growing needs of the organization and was based on legacy code plagued with significant “technical debt.

The Solution

RiskSpan partnered with the client to identify and vet out a cloud-based SaaS solution provider to function as the system of record for all claims processed within the organization. This partnership ran from the discovery phase all the way through the production roll-out and post roll-out business-as-usual phase.  

RiskSpan also assisted with the data migration ETL project necessary to transfer existing open and recent claims to the new platform. All existing interfaces with internal systems and third parties were reconfigured to be functional with the new claims platform. 

SPEAK TO AN EXPERT

Client Benefit

Cloud adoption enabled the client to improve its technology capability score from AM Best Ratings, a key metric for evaluating the health of insurance carriers. 

Project deliverables included: 

  • Documentation of the current state of all internal and external interfaces  
  • Design and Solution Architecture for impacted interfaces 
  • API Design and Data Normalization across the Claims enterprise 
  • API Interfaces using Reactive Programming principles 
  • Implementation of the required security compliance for all data transmissions to and from the public cloud 
  • Integration with Azure identity systems for SSO Integration 
  • Automated Integration testing 
  • Data Lake on SQL Server to facilitate data migration 
  • Financial Reporting from Data Lake using Tableau Server 
  • Agile Project Delivery with 4-week sprints using SAFe Release Trains. 
  • Technology Stack – Java, Spring Cloud, Spring Boot, Spring Security, AS400 DataQueues, Azure SSO, JIRA, Jenkins, Gradle, OAuth 2, Tomcat, GIT, Gerrit, JSON, XML, SQL, Stored Procedures. 

National Property and Casualty Insurance Carrier: Customer Self Service Portal

A national property and casualty insurance carrier needed to modernize its customer selfservice portal. The complexity of the existing portal made it difficult for customers to find what they were looking for, resulting in declining customer engagement. The existing system was also inflexible and failed to align with the company’s new products and brand identity. 

The Solution

RiskSpan led the development of a state-of-the-art, web-based application enabling customers to resolve a full range of self-service needs without resorting to customer service callThe solution was developed using the Design Thinking approach, putting users first and offering a simplified and seamless experience when servicing policies.  

Client Benefits

The technical architecture laid the foundation for all future web-based applications to be developed within the organization. 

The new portal was sufficiently flexible to support rapid deployment of new features relating to the changing product landscape owing to increases in recent catastrophic events. 

Other client deliverables included: 

  • Technical Architecture for the proposed JavaScript front-end platform which would be supported by a micro-services based backend system 
  • Proof of Concept delivery with Rapid Prototyping 
  • Implemented a React based Front end application with reusable component libraries 
  • Component libraries have been implemented in the organization’s new branding aesthetic and will be made available through an internal component repository that can be leveraged by all applications. 
  • Optimized solution to meet future performance demands and scaling to ensure a consistent user experience 
  • A/B Testing capabilities to ensure continual user engagement 
  • Agile Project Delivery with 2-week sprints using SAFe Release Trains 
  • Kanban Development adopted post production roll-out with interrupt capacity planning to rapidly address issues that might come up in production. 
  • Unified code-base to support application delivery over mobile apps as well 
  • Technology Stack – Typescript, React.js, React Native, Material UI, Redux, Java, Spring Boot, Spring Security, JIRA, Jenkins, Gradle, OAuth 2, Node.js, Tomcat, GIT, Gerrit, JSON. 

Will a Rising VQI Materially Impact Servicing Costs and MSR Valuations?

VQI-GraphVQI-Current-Layers-September-2021

RiskSpan’s Vintage Quality Index computes and aggregates the percentage of Agency originations each month with one or more “risk factors” (low-FICO, high DTI, high LTV, cash-out refi, investment properties, etc.). Months with relatively few originations characterized by these risk factors are associated with lower VQI ratings. As the historical chart above shows, the index maxed out (i.e., had an unusually high number of loans with risk factors) leading up to the 2008 crisis.

RiskSpan uses the index principally to fine-tune its in-house credit and prepayment models by accounting for shifts in loan composition by monthly cohort.

Will a rising VQI translate into higher servicing costs?

The Vintage Quality Index continued to climb during the third quarter of 2021, reaching a value of 85.10, compared to 83.40 in the second quarter. The higher index value means that a higher percentage of loans were originated with one or more defined risk factors.

The rise in the index during Q3 was less dramatic than Q2’s increase but nevertheless continues a trend going back to the start of the pandemic. The increase continues to be driven by a subset of risk factors, notably the share of cash-out refinances and investor properties (both up significantly) and high-DTI loans (up modestly). On balance, fewer loans were characterized by the remaining risk metrics.

What might this mean for servicing costs?

Servicing costs are highly sensitive to loan performance. Performing Agency loans are comparatively inexpensive to service, while non-performing loans can cost thousands of dollars per year more — usually several times the amount a servicer can expect to earn in servicing fees and other ancillary servicing revenue.

For this reason, understanding the “vintage quality” of newly originated mortgage pools is an element to consider when forecasting servicing cash flows (and, by extension, MSR pricing).

Each of the risk layers that compose the VQI contributes to marginally higher default risk (and, therefore, a theoretically lower servicing valuation). But not all risk layers affect expected cash flows equally. It is also important to consider the VQI in relationship to its history. While the index has been rising since the pandemic, it remains relatively low by historical standards — still below a local high in early 2018 and certainly nowhere near the heights reached leading up to the 2008 financial crisis.

A look at the individual risk metrics driving the increase would also seem to reduce any cause for alarm. While the ever-increasing number of loans with high debt-to-income ratios could be a matter of some concern, the other two principal contributors to the overall VQI rise — loans on investment properties and cash-out refinances — do not appear to jeopardize servicing cash flows to the same degree as low credit scores and high DTI ratios do.

Consequently, while the gradual increase in loans with one or more risk factors bears watching, it likely should not have a significant bearing (for now) on how investors price Agency MSR assets.

VQI-Risk-Layer-All-Issued-Loans-September-2021VQI-Risk-Layers-FICO-660-September-2021

VQI-LTV-80-Shared-of-Issued-Loans-September-2021 VQI-Debt-to-Income-45-Share-of-Issued-Loans-September-2021 VQI-Adjustabel-Rate-Share-of-issued-Loans-September-2021 VQI-Loans-with-Subordinate-Financing-September-2021-1024x399.png

Population assumptions:

  • Monthly data for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
  • Loans originated more than three months prior to issuance are excluded because the index is meant to reflect current market conditions.
  • Loans likely to have been originated through the HARP program, as identified by LTV, MI coverage percentage, and loan purpose, are also excluded. These loans do not represent credit availability in the market as they likely would not have been originated today but for the existence of HARP.

Data assumptions:

  • Freddie Mac data goes back to 12/2005. Fannie Mae only back to 12/2014.
  • Certain fields for Freddie Mac data were missing prior to 6/2008.

GSE historical loan performance data release in support of GSE Risk Transfer activities was used to help back-fill data where it was missing.

An outline of our approach to data imputation can be found in our VQI Blog Post from October 28, 2015.


RiskSpan Wins Risk as a Service Category for Second Consecutive Year, Leaps 12 Spots in RiskTech100® 2022 Ranking

RiskSpan’s Edge Platform, a leadingRiskTech 100 provider of risk analytics, data, and behavioral modeling to the structured finance industry, is the “Risk as a Service” category winner for the second consecutive year in Chartis Research’s prestigious RiskTech100® ranking of the world’s 100 top risk technology firms. 

The win accompanies a 12-point improvement in RiskSpan’s overall ranking, placing the firm among the year’s most significant movers.  

“RiskSpan’s continued growth and ongoing partnership strategy have made it one of the big risers in the rankings this year,” said Phil Mackenzie, Research Principal at Chartis Research. “Its strength in securitization and analytics as a service is reflected in its 12-point jump.” 

Licensed by some of the largest asset managers, broker/dealers, hedge funds, mortgage REITs and insurance companies in the U.S., Edge is a one-stop shop for research, analytics, pricing, risk metrics, and reporting. Edge’s cloud-native infrastructure scales as individual client needs change and is supported by RiskSpan’s unparalleled team of mortgage and structured finance experts.  

“This year’s award reflects a year marked by an unprecedented wave of enhancements to our risk platform, noted Bernadette Kogler, RiskSpan’s co-founder and CEO. “Our loan-level analytics has been a hit, while our fully managed risk option continues to tailor scalable offerings to individual client needs. Our best-in-class portfolio analytics for structured products are fast becoming the talk of the industry.”


About RiskSpan 

RiskSpan offers end-to-end solutions for data management, risk analytics, and visualization on a highly secure, fast, and fully scalable, cloud-native platform that has earned the trust of the mortgage and structured finance industry’s largest firms. Combining the strength of subject matter experts, quantitative analysts, and technologists, RiskSpan’s Edge Platform integrates a range of datasets – structured and unstructured – and off-the-shelf analytical tools providing users with powerful insights and a competitive advantage. Learn more at www.riskspan.com.


About Chartis Research: 

Chartis Research is the leading provider of research and analysis on the global market for risk technology. It is part of Infopro Digital, which owns market-leading brands such as Risk and WatersTechnology. Chartis’ goal is to support enterprises as they drive business performance through improved risk management, corporate governance and compliance, and to help clients make informed technology and business decisions by providing in-depth analysis and actionable advice on virtually all aspects of risk technology. 


Non-Linear Paths to Leadership: RiskSpan to Join Structured Finance Association WiS NextGen Panel

On Tuesday, November 16th RiskSpan CEO Bernadette Kogler joined fellow Women in Securitization NextGen panelists Beth O’Brien, Adama Kah, and Libby Cantrill, CFA to discuss Seizing Opportunites at Every Stage of Your Career, moderated by Structured Finance Association President Kristi Leo.

Watch here: https://structuredfinance.org/women-in-securitization/ Wis NextGen:Non-Linear Paths to Leadership

Topics included:

  • Why it’s essential to take risks in your career
  • How to seize opportunities and take on challenges
  • Leveraging an entrepreneurial spirit when exploring possibilities that don’t align with a preset career path – and taking that leap


RiskSpan, Arete Risk Advisors Announce Strategic Consulting Partnership

AreteRiskSpan, a leading provider of data and analytics solutions to the mortgage industry, has announced a partnership with Arete Risk Advisors, LLC, to complement RiskSpan’s existing team of data science, modeling, and financial engineering consultants.  A woman-owned firm boasting a deep bench of experienced housing finance professionals, Arete delivers unparalleled expertise in applying operations, information technology, governance, risk management, and internal controls best practices to every aspect of home lending.  Arete is led by managing partner Patricia Black, an industry-leading executive in home lending. Prior to founding Arete, Patricia served as Fannie Mae’s Chief Audit Executive, Chief of Staff at Caliber Home Loans, the Head of Sales and Operations at SoFi, and a Senior Manager at KPMG Consulting/BearingPoint.    “I’m very excited to be involved with a growing woman-owned business while simultaneously expanding our own advisory offering,” said Bernadette Kogler, Co-Founder and CEO of RiskSpan. “Arete’s emphasis on delivering top-qualify mortgage compliance, controls, governance, and operations services creates a natural synergy with RiskSpan’s data and modeling capabilities. This partnership promises to benefit clients of both firms.”  Patricia Black added, “the opportunity to grow with Bernadette and the RiskSpan team to expand women-owned businesses in the home lending space is inspiring and I am excited about contributing to the continued success of Bernadette and her team.”  Learn more about Arete’s range of services at www.areteriskadvisors.com. Questions about the firm may be directed to info@areteriskadvisors.com.  About RiskSpan  RiskSpan offers end-to-end solutions for data management, risk analytics, and visualization on a highly secure, fast, and fully scalable, cloud-native platform that has earned the trust of the mortgage and structured finance industry’s largest firms. Combining the strength of subject matter experts, quantitative analysts, and technologists, RiskSpan’s Edge Platform integrates a range of datasets – structured and unstructured – and off-the-shelf analytical tools providing users with powerful insights and a competitive advantage. Learn more at www.riskspan.com. 


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