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RiskSpan Launches MBS Loan Level Historical Data on Snowflake Marketplace

ARLINGTON, Va., June 18, 2024 – RiskSpan, a leading provider of data analytics and risk management solutions for the mortgage industry, announced today that it has launched MBS Loan Level Historical Data on Snowflake Marketplace. RiskSpan’s MBS Loan Level Historical Data on Snowflake Marketplace enables joint customers to access RiskSpan’s normalized and enriched loan-level data for Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Ginnie Mae mortgage-backed securities.

“We are thrilled to join the Snowflake Marketplace and offer our loan-level MBS data to a wider audience of Snowflake users,” said Janet Jozwik, Senior Managing Director at RiskSpan. “This is a first step in what we believe will ultimately become a cloud-based analytical hub for MBS investors everywhere.”

RiskSpan and Snowflake, the AI Data Cloud company, are working together to help joint customers inform business decisions and drive innovations by enabling them to query the data using SQL, join it with other data sources, and scale up or down as needed. RiskSpan also provides sample code and calculations to help users get started with common metrics such as CPR, aging curves, and S-curves.

“RiskSpan’s launch of a unique blend of enriched data onto Snowflake Marketplace represents a major opportunity for Snowflake customers to unlock new value through data on their business journey,” said Kieran Kennedy, Head of Marketplace at Snowflake. “We welcome RiskSpan to the ecosystem and look forward to exploring how we can support our customers as they look to leverage the breadth of the Snowflake platform more effectively.”

Joint customers can now leverage Loan-Level MBS Data on Snowflake Marketplace, allowing them to access RiskSpan data enhancements, including servicer normalization, refinements, mark-to-market LTV calculations, current coupon. These and other enhancements make it easier and faster for users to perform analysis and modeling.

Snowflake Marketplace is powered by Snowflake’s ground-breaking cross-cloud technology, Snowgrid, allowing companies direct access to raw data products and the ability to leverage data, data services, and applications quickly, securely, and cost-effectively. Snowflake Marketplace simplifies discovery, access, and the commercialization of data products, enabling companies to unlock entirely new revenue streams and extended insights across the AI Data Cloud. To learn more about Snowflake Marketplace and how to find, try and buy the data, data services, and applications needed for innovative business solutions, click here.

About RiskSpan, Inc. 

RiskSpan delivers a single analytics solution for structured finance and private credit investors of any size to confidently make faster, more precise trading and portfolio risk decisions and meet reporting requirements with fewer resources, and less time spent managing multiple vendors and internal solutions. Learn more at www.riskspan.com.

The newest, fastest and easiest way to access and analyze Agency MBS data

TL;DR Summary of Benefits

  • Data normalization and enhancement: RiskSpan’s MBS data on Snowflake normalizes Fannie, Freddie, and Ginnie loan-level data, consolidating everything into one set of field names. It also offers enhanced loan level-data fields, including current coupon, spec pool category, and mark-to-market LTV, which are not available in the raw data from the agencies. The data also includes pool-level factors like pool prefix and pool age, as well as full loan histories not available from the GSEs directly.
  • Data access and querying: Users access the data in Snowflake using SQL or Python connectors. Snowflake functions essentially as a cloud SQL server that allows for instantaneous data sharing across entities. In just a few clicks, users can start analyzing MBS data using their preferred coding language—no data, ETL, or IT Teams required.
  • Data merging and analytics: Users can merge the data in Snowflake with other available loan level or macroeconomic data, including interest rates, home prices, and unemployment, for advanced analytics. Users can also project performance, monitor portfolios, and create spec pools, among other features.
CHECK OUT RISKSPAN’S OFFERING ON SNOWFLAKE MARKETPLACE

The Problem

Even though Fannie, Freddie and Ginnie have been making MBS performance data publicly available for years, working with the raw data can be challenging for traders and back-office analysts.

Traders and analysts already have many of the tools they need to write powerful queries that can reveal hidden patterns and insights across different markets – patterns that can reveal lucrative trading opportunities based on prepayment analysis. But one big obstacle often stands in the way of getting the most out of these tools: the data from the agencies is large and unwieldy and is not formatted in a consistent way, making it hard to compare and combine.

What’s more, the Agencies do not maintain full history of published data on the websites for download. Only recent history is available.

The Solution: RiskSpan’s new MBS loan-level historical offering on Snowflake Marketplace

Using RiskSpan’s new MBS Loan-Level Historical Data Offering, MBS traders and analysts can now leverage the power of Snowflake, the leading cloud data platform, to perform complex queries and merge data from multiple sources like never before.

This comprehensive data offering provides a fully normalized view of the entire history of loan-level performance data across Agencies – allowing users to interact with the full $9T Agency MBS market in unprecedented ways.

A list of normalized Fannie and Freddie fields can be found at the end of this post.

In addition to being able to easily compare different segments of the market using a single set of standardized data fields, MBS traders and analysts also benefit from derived and enhanced data, such as current coupon, refinance incentive, current loan-to-value ratio, original specified pool designation, and normalized seller and servicer names.

The use cases are practically limitless.

MBS traders and analystscan track historical prepayment speeds, find trading opportunities that offer relative value, and build, improve, or calibrate prepayment models. They can see how prepayment rates vary by loan size, credit score, geographic location, or other factors. They can also identify pools that have faster or slower prepayments than expected and exploit the differences in price.

Loan originators can see how their loans perform compared to similar loans issued by other originators, servicers, or agencies, allowing them to showcase their ability to originate high-quality loans that command premium pricing.

Enhanced fields provide users with more comprehensive insights and analysis capabilities. They include a range of derived and enhanced data attributes beyond the standard dataset: derived fields useful for calculations, additional macroeconomic data, and normalized field names and enumerations. These fields give users the flexibility to customize their analyses by incorporating additional data elements tailored to their specific needs or research objectives.

Enhanced loan-level fields include:

  • Refi Incentive: The extent to which a borrower’s interest rate exceeds current prevailing market rates
  • Spread at Origination (SATO): a representation of the total opportunities for refinancing within a mortgage servicing portfolio. SATO encompasses all potential refinance candidates based on prevailing market conditions, borrower eligibility, and loan characteristics
  • Servicer Normalization: A standardization of servicer names to ensure consistency and accuracy in reporting and analysis
  • Scheduled Balance: A helper field necessary to easily calculate CPR and other performance metrics
  • Spec Pool Type: A designation of the type of spec story on the loan’s pool at origination
  • Current LTV: a walked forward LTV based on FHFA’s HPI and the current balance of the loan

Not available in the raw data from the agencies, these fields allow MBS traders and analysts to seamlessly project loan and pool performance, monitor portfolios, create and evaluate spec pools, and more.

Access the Data on Your Terms

Traders and analysts can access the data in Snowflake using SQL or Python connectors. Alternatively, they can also access the data through the Edge UI, our well-established product for ad hoc querying and visualization. RiskSpan’s Snowflake listing provides sample queries and a data dictionary for reference. Data can be merged with macroeconomic data from other sources – rates, HPI data, unemployment – for deeper insights and analytics.

The listing is available for a 15-day free trial and can be purchased on a monthly or annual basis. Users don’t need to have a Snowflake account to try it out. Learn more and get started at the Snowflake Marketplace or contact us to schedule a demo or discussion.

CHECK OUT RISKSPAN’S OFFERING ON SNOWFLAKE MARKETPLACE

Fannie/Freddie Normalized Fields

NAMETYPEDESCRIPTION
AGENumberLoan Age in Months
AGENCYVarcharFN [Fannie Mae], FH [Freddie Mac]
ALTDQRESOLUTIONVarcharPayment deferral type: CovidPaymentDeferral,DisasterPaymentDeferral,PaymentDeferral,Other/NA
BORROWERASSISTPLANVarcharType of Assistance: Forbearance, Repayment, TrialPeriod, OtherWorkOut, NoWorkOut, NotApplicable, NotAvailable
BUSINESSDAYSNumberBusiness Day in Factor Period
COMBINEDLTVFloatOriginal Combined LTV
CONTRIBUTIONFloatContribution of Loan to the Pool, to be used to correctly attribution Freddie Mirror Pools
COUPONFloatNet Coupon or NWAC in %
CURRBALANCEFloatCurrent Balance Amount
CURRENTCOUPONFloatPrimary rate in the market (PMMS)
CURRENTLTVFloatCurrent Loan to Value Ratio based on rolled-forward home value calculated by RiskSpan based on FHFA All-Transaction data
CURTAILAMOUNTFloatDollar amount curtailed in the period
DEFERRALAMOUNTFloatDollar amount deferred
DQSTRINGVarcharDelinquency History String, left most field in the current period
DTIFloatDebt to Income Ratio %
FACTORDATEDatePerformance Period
FICONumberBorrower FICO Score [300,850]
FIRSTTIMEBUYERVarcharFirst time home buyer flag Y,N,NA
ISSUEDATEDateLoan Origination Date
LOANPURPOSEVarcharLoan Purpose: REFI,PURCHASE,NA
LTVFloatOriginal Loan to Value Ratio in %
MATURITYDATEDateLoan Maturity Date
MICOVERAGEFloatMortgage Insurance Coverage %
MOSDELINQVarcharDelinquency Status: Current, DQ_30_Day, DQ_60_Day, DQ_90_Day, DQ_120_Day, DQ_150_Day, DQ_180_Day, DQ_210_Day, DQ_240_Day, DQ_270_Day, DQ_300_Day, DQ_330_Day, DQ_360_Day, DQ_390_Day, DQ_420_Day, DQ_450_Day, DQ_480_Day, DQ_510_Day, DQ_540_Day, DQ_570_Day, DQ_600_Day, DQ_630_Day, DQ_660_Day, DQ_690_Day, DQ_720pls_Day
MSAVarcharMetropolitian Statistical Area
NUMBEROFBORROWERSNumberNumber of Borrowers
NUMBEROFUNITSVarcharNumber of Units
OCCUPANCYTYPEVarcharOccupancy Type: NA,INVESTOR,OWNER,SECOND
ORIGBALANCEFloatOriginal Loan Balance
ORIGSPECPOOLTYPEVarcharSpec Story of the pool that the loan is a part of. Please see Spec Pool Logic in our linked documentation
PERCENTDEFERRALFloatPercentage of the loan balance that is deferred
PIWVarcharProperty Inspection Waiver Type: Appraisal,Waiver,OnsiteDataCollection, GSETargetedRefi, Other,NotAvailable
POOLAGENumberAge of the Pool
POOLIDVarcharPool ID

Transforming Loan Data Management Using Snowflake Secure Data Sharing

Presenters

Paul Gross

Senior Quantitative Analyst, Rithm Capital

Michael Cowley

Principal, Data Cloud Products, Snowflake

Bernadette Kogler

CEO, RiskSpan

Suhrud Dagli

CTO, RiskSpan

Wednesday, May 29th, 2024

1:00 ET

Hear from a distinguished panel including RiskSpan and Snowflake customers as they describe how Data Share has transformed their approach to mortgage investment. Specific topics to include:

  • High-speed data processing using Snowflake for easy delivery of risk analytics and diligence data
  • How Snowflake’s Data Sharing facilitates data access across and between organizations while maximizing computational performance and flexibility 
  • How Snowflake protects client data
  • The unique value of a central hub for all mortgage industry data and never having to FTP a file again

watch recording

Karthika Mani

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Our Feature Spotlight
Karthika Mani
Senior QA Lead

How long have you been with RiskSpan?
13 years
What does your role at RiskSpan entail?

Senior QA Lead. I work closely with the development team, and responsible for validating new feature enhancements, software upgrades, and bug fixes to ensure the highest quality standards are maintained across various development projects, mainly EDGE and PROSUP. Additionally, I take on the responsibility of delivering error-free client logins for new clients, ensuring a seamless onboarding experience. My role extends beyond traditional testing activities as I actively engage in testing new servers, environments, and APIs. Furthermore, I am documenting the modules and functionalities of EDGE, ensuring comprehensive coverage and clarity regarding the platform’s capabilities. I am responsible for coordinating the quarterly SOC process reports for Securities and Loans Allowance modules contributing to the overall security and compliance efforts of the organization. I also engage in other supporting tasks like interviews etc.

What 3 words best describe RiskSpan?
Collaborative, Progressive and Trustworthy
What are your favorite hobbies?
Music and Trekking/Hiking.
What is one thing on your Bucket List? 
Mount Kailash and Amsterdam.
What is your go-to or favorite snack? 
Buttered Corn and Bitter Gourd Chips.
What do you like about our company culture?
I like our company’s teamwork efforts, transparency, and upholding values among colleagues from diverse backgrounds. And the supportive work environment helps us with a healthy work-life balance, allowing us to make significant contribution towards our work.
Which company values resonate with you the most?
Transparency and Passion. I am deeply passionate and transparent about the work I do and I believe that it is essential for engaging and excellence. I felt my suggestions are always considered.
Describe how you’ve grown professionally since you started working for us?
Since joining Riskspan as a fresher, I got the opportunity to validate different projects spanning from Velocity till Edge which contributed to my growth in testing and quality assurance. I have expanded my technical skills through hands-on experience with various tools and methodologies. My understanding on the mortgage industry has deepened, and the validation process for structured products has helped me with insights to develop more strategic test scenarios according to the client needs. I have also gained knowledge of industry specific practices. I’ve been fortunate to have supportive seniors who’ve guided me along the way, and I’ve embraced the opportunity to pay it forward by mentoring juniors thereby promoting growth within the team.

Zeren Zhang

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zeren-zhang

Our Feature Spotlight
Zeren Zhang
Model Risk Analyst

How long have you been with RiskSpan?
About four and a half years.
What does your role at RiskSpan entail?

I work as an analyst in Model Risk Management team. My primary role is to validate the models and ensure the models can fulfill their purposes. I also contribute to management tasks, including designing test cases, tracking project status, and communicating with clients.

What 3 words best describe RiskSpan?
Supportive, Dynamic, Reliable
What are your favorite hobbies?
Traveling and cooking.
What is one thing on your Bucket List? 
Travel abroad to experience different cultures.
What is your go-to or favorite snack? 
Loacker chocolate wafer cookies.
What do you like about our company culture?
Supportive. RiskSpan fosters a culture of collaboration, where every member willingly offers support and assistance to their peers. Individuals are enthusiastic about sharing their expertise and abilities to contribute to the success of others.
Which company values resonate with you the most?
Inclusion. RiskSpan organizes monthly happy hours, town hall meeting and other activities to foster a sense of belonging and inclusivity among members.
Describe how you’ve grown professionally since you started working for us?
At RiskSpan, I have the opportunity to assess models constructed using various methodologies during validations, thereby enhancing my understanding of modeling processes in practice. Additionally, engaging in management tasks has contributed to the improvement of my communication skills. Through these experiences, I’ve gained valuable insights into both technical aspects of modeling and effective communication.

What Do 2024 Origination Trends Mean for MSRs?

While mortgage rates remain stubbornly high by recent historical standards, accurately forecasting MSR performance and valuations requires a thoughtful evaluation of loan characteristics that go beyond the standard “refi incentive” measure.

As we pointed out in 2023, these characteristics are particularly important when it comes to predicting involuntary prepayments.

This post updates our mortgage origination trends for the first quarter of 2024 and takes a look at what they could be telling us.

Average credit scores, which were markedly higher than normal during the pandemic years, have returned and stayed near the averages observed during the latter half of the 2010s.

The most credible explanation for this most recent reversion to the mean is the fact that the Covid years were accompanied by an historically strong refinance market. Refis traditionally have higher FICO scores than purchase mortgages, and this is apparent in the recent trend.

Purchase markets are also associated with higher average LTV ratios than are refi markets, which accounts for their sharp rise during the same period.

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Consequently, in 2023 and 2024, with high home prices persisting despite extremely high interest rates, new first-time homebuyers with good credit continue to be approved for loans, but with higher LTV and DTI ratios.

Between rates and home prices, ​​borrowers simply need to borrow more now than they would have just a few years ago to buy a comparable house. This is reflected not just in the average DTI and LTV, but also the average loan size (below) which, unsurprisingly, continues to trend higher as well.

Recent large increases to the conforming loan limit are clearly also contributing to the higher average loan size.

What, then, do these origination trends mean for the MSR market?

The very high rates associated with newer originations clearly translate to higher risk of prepayments. We have seen significant spikes in actual speeds when rates have taken a leg down — even though the loans are still very new. FICO/LTV/DTI trends also potentially portend higher delinquencies down the line, which would negatively impact MSR valuations.

Nevertheless, today’s MSR trading market remains healthy, and demand is starting to catch up with the high supply as more money is being raised and put to work by investors in this space. Supply remains high due to the need for mortgage originators to monetize the value of MSR to balance out the impact from declining originations.

However, the nature of the MSR trade has evolved from the investor’s perspective. When rates were at historic lows for an extended period, the MSR trade was relatively straightforward as there was a broader secular rate play in motion. Now, however, bidders are scrutinizing available deals more closely — evaluating how speeds may differ from historical trends or from what the models would typically forecast.

These more granular reviews are necessarily beginning to focus on how much lower today’s already very low turnover speeds can actually go and the extent of lock-in effects for out-of-the-money loans at differing levels of negative refi incentive. Investors’ differing views on prepays across various pools in the market will often be the determining factor on who wins the bid.

Investor preference may also be driven by the diversity of an investor’s other holdings. Some investors are looking for steady yield on low-WAC MSRs that have very small prepayment risk while other investors are seeking the higher negative convexity risk of higher-WAC MSRs — for example, if their broader portfolio has very limited negative convexity risk.

In sum, investors have remained patient and selective — seeking opportunities that best fit their needs and preferences.

So what else do MSR holders need to focus on that may may impact MSR valuations going forward? 

The impact from changes in HPI is one key area of focus.

While year-over-year HPI remains positive nationally, servicers and other investors really need to look at housing values region by region. The real risk comes in the tails of local home price moves that are often divorced from national trends. 

For example, HPIs in Phoenix, Austin, and Boise (to name three particularly volatile MSAs) behaved quite differently from the nation as a whole as HPIs in these three areas in particular first got a boost from mass in-migration during the pandemic and have since come down to earth.

Geographic concentrations within MSR books will be a key driver of credit events. To that end, we are seeing clients beginning to examine their portfolio concentration as granularly as zipcode level. 

Declining home values will impact most MSR valuation models in two offsetting ways: slower refi speeds will result in higher MSR values, while the increase in defaults will push MSRs back downward. Of these two factors, the slower speeds typically take precedence. In today’s environment of slow speeds driven primarily by turnover, however, lower home prices are going to blunt the impact of speeds, leaving MSR values more exposed to the impact of higher defaults.

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GenAI Applications for Loans and Mapping Data

RiskSpan is actively furthering the advancement of several GenAI applications aimed at transforming how mortgage loan and private credit investors work and maximizing their efficiency and performance. They include:

1. Tape-Cracking 3.0: Making RiskSpan’s Smart Mapper Even Smarter

RiskSpan’s Edge Platform currently uses machine learning techniques as part of its Smart Mapper ETL Tool. When a new portfolio is loaded in a new format, the fuzzy logic that powers the Platform’s recommended mappings gets continually refined based on user activity.

In the coming months, the Platform’s existing ML-driven ETL process will be further refined to leverage the latest GenAI technology.

GenAI lends additional context to the automated mapping process by incorporating an understanding not only of the data in an individual column, but also of surrounding data as well as learned characteristics of the asset class in question. The resulting evolution from simply trying to ensure the headers match up a more holistic understanding of what the data actually is and the meaning it seeks to convey will be a game changer for downstream analysts seeking to make reliable data-driven investment decisions.

RiskSpan made several updates in 2023 to help users automate the end-to-end workflow for loan valuation and surveillance. AI-based data loading combined with the Platform’s loan risk assumptions and flexible data model will enable users to obtain valuation and risk metrics simply by dragging and dropping a loan file into the application.

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2. Modeling Private Credit Transactions

Many financial institutions and legal advisors still spend an extraordinary amount of time reading and extracting relevant information from legal documents that accompany structured private credit transactions.

RiskSpan has partnered with clients to develop a solution to extract key terms from private credit and funding transactions. Trained multimodal AI models are further extended to generate executable code valuations. This code will be fully integrated into RiskSpan’s risk and pricing platform.

The application solves a heretofore intractable problem in which the information necessary to generate accurate cash flows for private credit transactions is spread across multiple documents (a frequent occurrence when terms for individual classes can only be obtained from deal amendments).

Execution code for cash flow generation and valuation utilizes RiskSpan’s validated analytics routines, such as day count handling, payment calculations, discounting, etc.

3. “Insight Support”

Tech support is one of today’s most widely known (and widely experienced) GenAI use cases. Seemingly all-knowing chatbots immediately answer users’ questions, sparing them the inconvenience of having to wait for the next available human agent. Like every other company, RiskSpan is enhancing its traditional tech support processes with GenAI to answer questions faster and and embed user-facing AI help within the Platform itself. But RiskSpan is taking things a step further by also exploring how GenAI can upend and augment its clients’ workflows.

RiskSpan refers to this workflow augmentation as “Insight Support.”

With Insight Support, GenAI evaluates an individual user’s data, dynamically serves up key insights, and automatically completes routine analysis steps without prompting. The resulting application can understand an individual user’s data and recognize what is most important to identify and highlight as part of a loan data analysis workflow.

Insight Support, for example, can leverage insights obtained by the AI-driven “Smarter Mapping” process to identify what specific type of collateral reporting is necessary. It can produce reports that highlight outliers, recognize the typical analytical/valuation run settings a user would want to apply, and then execute the analytical run and summarize the results in management-ready reporting. All in the name of shortening the analysis time needed to evaluate new investment opportunities.

Conclusion

Considered collectively, these three applications are building toward having RiskSpan’s SaaS platform function as a “virtual junior analyst” capable of handling much of the tedious work involved in analyzing loan and structured product investments and freeing up human analysts for higher-order tasks and decision making.

GenAI is the future of data and analytics and is therefore the future of RiskSpan’s Edge Platform. By revolutionizing the way data is analyzed, AI-created and -validated models, dashboards, and sorted data are already allowing experts to redirect their attention away from time-consuming data wrangling tasks and toward more strategic critical thinking. The more complete adoption of fully optimized AI solutions throughout the industry, made possible by a rising generation of “AI-native” data scientists will only accelerate this phenomenon.

RiskSpan’s commitment to pushing the boundaries of innovation in the Loan and Structured Product Space is underscored by its strategic approach to GenAI. While acknowledging the challenges posed by GenAI, RiskSpan remains poised for the future, leveraging its expertise to navigate the evolving landscape. As the industry anticipates the promised benefits of GenAI, RiskSpan’s vision and applications stand as a testament to its role as a thought leader in shaping the future of data analytics.

Stay tuned for more updates on RiskSpan’s innovative solutions, as we continue to lead the way in harnessing the power of GenAI for the benefit of our clients and the industry at large.

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Celebrating Women’s Contributions by the Numbers

Because we’re a data company after all. RiskSpan commemorates International Women’s Day by taking note of the remarkable people behind these numbers.

Martha Stewart

Votes for Women

Serena Williams

Women's March in DC

Girls Who Code

Title IX

Sally Ride

Womens Rights

Taylor Swift

Sandra Day O'connor

Kathryn Blgelow

Betty White

Isabella Xiong

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Our Feature Spotlight
Isabella Xiong
Team Lead

How long have you been with RiskSpan?
About 11 months.
What does your role at RiskSpan entail?

As a member of the Client Success team, I work closely with clients by understanding their needs and providing effective methods to achieve their goals. My primary role centers on providing clients with tailored solutions, with a particular focus on Whole Loan and MSR analytics. I also work closely with the Product team to enhance Edge Platform features and functionalities.

What 3 words best describe RiskSpan?
Dynamic, Collaborative and Solution-oriented
What are your favorite hobbies?
Guitar, singing, hiking and reading.
What is one thing on your Bucket List? 
Write songs and sing with my own band.
What do you like about our company culture?
I like the inclusive culture here at RiskSpan, where individuals from diverse backgrounds are respected and valued. This environment offers flexibility and spaces for both personal and team development.
Which company values resonate with you the most?
Each individual is recognized and appreciated, fostering a sense of belonging and growth. I appreciate the company’s dedication to supporting its employees, creating an environment where I consistently feel motivated and supported. I also resonate with the company’s dedication to growth and excellence.
Describe how you’ve grown professionally since you started working for us
With support from my supervisor and colleagues, I’ve experienced significant professional growth especially in becoming proficient with the use of Edge and deepening my expertise in Whole Loan and MSRs analytics. Additionally, I’ve honed my communication skills and developed a client-focused mindset. I’ve also gained a broader perspective of the mortgage and structured finance industry.

Case Study: How a Large Financial Institution Allayed Regulator Concerns by Digitizing its Model Performance Tracking

The Situation 

One of the largest financial institutions in the world, operating in a highly competitive and regulated environment, found itself under increasing scrutiny over the fragmented state of its model performance tracking regime.

Failing to meet both internal standards and external regulatory expectations, the the institution’s model performance tracking relied on a loan-level analytical framework that overloaded its legacy systems and hindered its ability to react to changing market dynamics. These inadequacies led to significant challenges beyond regulatory scrutiny, including inefficiencies in risk management processes and higher overhead costs. The outlook for rectifying these shortcomings was murky. 

The Challenge 

The institution’s challenges were twofold.  

First, regulatory pressure was mounting, with potential repercussions including fines and restrictions on business activities. Regulators demanded transparent, accurate, and timely reporting of model performance, which the institution’s existing system could not provide. 

Second, the operational issues stemming from lackluster model performance tracking were beginning to affect the institution’s ability to capitalize on opportunities. These impacts included inaccurate risk assessments, suboptimal asset allocation, and impaired decision-making capabilities, all of which eroded the institution’s competitive edge.

The Solution 

The institution sought RiskSpan’s expertise to deliver a sustainable and effective MPT framework. The trust the institution placed in RiskSpan was grounded in RiskSpan’s history of helping other financial institutions navigate similar MPT shortcomings. 

RiskSpan conducted an in-depth gap analysis, developed a customized solution, and provided training and support. Designed to enhance the accuracy, efficiency, and transparency of model performance tracking, the solution incorporated advanced analytics, a holistic governance approach, and robust data management practices. Key components included:

Model Inventory Management: Creating a centralized repository for all models, including inputs, assumptions, and ownership to streamline tracking and compliance.

Model Performance Dashboard: Implementing a real-time monitoring dashboard that provides insights into each model’s performance, deviations from expected outcomes, and potential areas of concern.

Regulatory Compliance: Automating the generation of reports to ensure compliance with regulatory standards, reducing manual errors, and freeing up resources for other critical functions.

Training and Support: Providing comprehensive training to the institution’s staff to ensure they can effectively utilize the new system and offering ongoing support to address any issues promptly.

The partnership led to transformative outcomes, including improved risk management, reduced manual errors, and operational costs.

What this means for you (and your bank)

Precise model performance tracking can enhance risk management, regulatory compliance, and operational efficiency. Our expertise ensures that our clients are equipped with robust, cutting-edge solutions tailored to their specific needs. If you are encountering challenges, we encourage you to reach out to us for a consultation.

CLICK HERE to talk to us and see how RiskSpan can help you digitize your MPT process

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