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How RiskSpan Helped a Credit-Focused Investment Management Firm Transition to Snowflake

A leading investment management firm and recognized leader in structured credit, including asset-backed securities (ABS), mortgage-backed securities (MBS), and other fixed-income sectors, sought RiskSpan’s help transitioning key data processing functions from the data management platform 1010data to Snowflake.

The ability to share data with partners using the same system in which the analytics are performed made the combination of RiskSpan and Snowflake especially attractive. The shift provided significant operational and financial benefits to the client, marking another successful milestone in RiskSpan’s history of helping clients optimize their data management.

Converting Key Functionalities from 1010data to Snowflake

The company had been relying on 1010data for several critical timeseries-based calculations. However, the limitations of the platform—both in terms of speed and cost—prompted them to seek a more modern solution. RiskSpan worked closely with them to replicate and enhance key functionalities using Snowflake. Converted functionalities included:

  1. Timeseries-Based Calculations: We re-engineered these to operate efficiently within Snowflake’s cloud-native architecture, maintaining accuracy while enhancing processing speeds.
  2. fill_nearest: This function retrieves the nearest non-N/A value within a group. It was implemented seamlessly using Snowflake’s window functions, preserving data integrity while boosting performance.
  3. rolling_sum: Snowflake’s SQL capabilities were leveraged to implement the moving sum of valid (non-N/A) values within a window. This provided the company with more responsive and scalable time-series analysis capabilities.
  4. cumulative_run_length: The cumulative run length within a group was translated into Snowflake’s environment using efficient SQL queries, making the entire process faster and more robust.

Integration Capabilities

In addition to replicating 1010data’s core functionalities, the company sought to expand its data capabilities by integrating additional datasets such as Market Data and Home Price Indices (HPI). We showed them how to incorporate and analyze these datasets within Snowflake’s environment, further enhancing their decision-making capabilities.

This cross-functional integration was pivotal in showcasing Snowflake’s ability to streamline complex data workflows. By integrating third-party data directly into their ecosystem, our client can now generate more insightful reports and conduct deeper analysis across multiple datasets without leaving the Snowflake platform.

The Benefits of Transitioning to Snowflake

Our client experienced several immediate and impactful benefits by transitioning from 1010data to Snowflake were immediate and impactful. These included:

  • Complete Replacement of 1010data: With all critical functionalities successfully converted, the company now can fully discontinue their reliance on 1010data. This eliminates the need for maintaining multiple platforms and simplifies their technology stack.
  • Significant Cost Savings: Discontinuing 1010data relieved our client of the high costs associated with the platform’s licensing and maintenance fees. Snowflake’s cost-efficient pricing model has already resulted in substantial savings for the company.
  • Improved Processing Speeds: One of the most noticeable changes has been the drastic improvement in the company’s processing times. Snowflake’s optimized cloud infrastructure provides faster data processing and querying capabilities, significantly reducing time-to-insight.
  • Access to Full Snowflake Feature Set: Moving to Snowflake has enabled the company to take advantage of features such as data sharing, enhanced security, and elasticity. Snowflake’s built-in scalability ensures our client’s data infrastructure will continue to grow effortlessly as its data needs expand.
  • Speed and Cost Efficiency: The company has expressed particular satisfaction with both the speed and cost-efficiency of the Snowflake platform. The reduction in data processing time and cost per query has positively impacted its business operations.

Partnering with RiskSpan not only enabled the company to replace 1010data with a more modern and efficient platform, but it has also empowered them to take advantage of Snowflake’s newest, advanced features, including AI.

Contact us to learn how RiskSpan can help you unlock the full potential of your data by guiding you through complex transitions and helping you implement scalable, secure, and cost-effective solutions.

Enhancing a HELOC Lender’s Operations with RiskSpan’s Data as a Service (DaaS)

A leading fintech company specializing in home equity lines of credit (HELOCs), was seeking to optimize the management of its data operations. To accomplish this, the company turned to RiskSpan, a leader in data analytics and financial technology solutions. Through a tailored Data as a Service (DaaS) offering, RiskSpan helped the company improve its HELOC business operations by providing advanced data management and modeling capabilities.

Challenges

The company sought to enhance its HELOC operations in two critical areas:

  1. Data Management and Integration: The company was dealing with complex data sets from multiple sources, including credit bureaus, property data, and customer behavior insights. Integrating and managing this data effectively was crucial for making informed lending decisions.
  2. Risk Assessment and Modeling: Accurate and reliable risk assessment models were necessary for evaluating customer behavior and predicting loan performance. The company required a solution that could model draw behavior and other variables specific to HELOCs.

RiskSpan’s DaaS Solution

RiskSpan’s DaaS offering provided the company with a comprehensive solution tailored to address these challenges. The key components of the solution included:

  1. Advanced Data Integration: RiskSpan’s DaaS platform seamlessly integrated the company’s various data sources, enabling a more streamlined and efficient data management process. This integration allowed the company to better understand their borrowers and make more informed lending decisions.
  2. Enhanced Loan-Level HELOC Pricing and Projections: The client successfully loaded its historical loan performance data onto RiskSpan’s DaaS platform and established a monthly process within the platform’s flexible data warehouse. Using the embedded historical performance tool, the client analyzed loan-level behavior across its portfolio. This enabled the client to generate detailed collateral performance reports for investors and rating agencies, as well as leverage these insights to enhance future projections and loan-level pricing for new loans.
  3. Cost-Effective Data Services: RiskSpan also identified an opportunity to replace the client’s existing data services provider at a significantly reduced cost. By offering a more competitive pricing structure while maintaining high-quality data services, RiskSpan positioned the client to achieve substantial cost savings, making them more competitive in the HELOC market.

Outcomes and Benefits

Implementing RiskSpan’s DaaS solution brought several key benefits:

  • Improved Decision-Making: With better-integrated data and more accurate modeling of HELOC draw behavior, the client could make more informed lending decisions, ultimately reducing risk and enhancing profitability.
  • Operational Efficiency: The streamlined data management process allowed the client to operate more efficiently, freeing up resources to focus on core business activities.
  • Cost Savings: RiskSpan’s competitive pricing enabled the client to cut costs significantly, improving their bottom line and allowing them to reinvest in other areas of the business.

RiskSpan’s Data as a Service solution provided the clients with the tools it needed to optimize its HELOC business. By addressing its data integration challenges, improving risk assessment through advanced modeling, and offering a cost-effective alternative to existing data services, RiskSpan helped the client strengthen its market position and enhance overall business performance.

Leveraging Pool-Specific Performance and Recapture Analysis: A Game Changer for MSR Investors

Successfully forecasting MSR cash flows demands a level of precision and granularity in data analysis that few other asset classes require. This is especially true for investors seeking to estimate how much prepayment runoff they can reasonably expect to recapture, which is key to the performance of the asset. And often investors need to measure that performance by the specific pools of MSRs they purchase — as each pool may have its own unique recapture arrangements.

RiskSpan’s Edge Platform has incorporated a robust framework for managing MSR investment performance by enabling investors to track pool-specific performance and recapture analyses, thus obtaining a more nuanced understanding of their portfolios. In this post, we delve into some of the specific challenges MSRs pose, the benefits of transaction-specific segmentation, and the unique capabilities of RiskSpan’s Edge Platform.

Understanding Pool-Specific Performance

Owning MSRs requires investors to track the performance of various loan pools over time. For example, an investor may purchase an MSR pool and rely on a sub-servicer to service the loans as well as make efforts to recapture borrowers that are looking to refinance. It is important for the investor to understand and track the returns on that pool which may be largely driven by recapture efficiency.  

While performance needs to be monitored on a pool-level, the modeling of the underlying loans is dependent on the distinct characteristics of the loans within a pool and will be more accurate if the models are run at the loan-level (or at granular rep lines determined by smart rep line logic).  The ability to capture and analyze these pool-specific cash flows based on granular loan-level modeling is crucial for several reasons:

  1. Valuation Accuracy: Each loan can be valued more accurately by considering its unique attributes, such as the original loan terms, interest rates, and borrower profiles (e.g., FICO, LTV); at the same time, pools can be valued based on pool-specific assumptions such as recapture rates and prepayment penalties.
  2. Risk Management: Understanding the performance of individual pools helps in identifying which pools are more prone to prepayments or defaults, enabling more focused efforts on recapture and other risk management activities.
  3. Performance Tracking: Investors can track historical returns, CPRs, CDRs, Recapture and other historical performance metrics for each pool, facilitating more informed decision-making.

Supporting this functionality is RiskSpan’s ability to share and integrate data on Snowflake’s data cloud. RiskSpan’s Snowflake integration enhances the data management and analytics capabilities available to clients. Investors can easily share transaction-specific data through Snowflake, which is then seamlessly integrated into the Edge platform. The platform can then handle the large datasets (tens of millions of loans in some instances), providing real-time analytics and insights.

Recapture Analysis: Enhancing Portfolio Performance

Recapture analysis is a critical component for MSR portfolio risk management. When borrowers refinance or otherwise pay off their loans, the servicer’s cash flows usually vanish entirely. However, if, in the case of refinance, the investor retains the rights to service the loan replacing the refinanced loan, then the new loan can be considered as a recapture. RiskSpan’s Edge platform excels in tracking these recaptures, offering several advantages:

  1. Detailed Tracking: The platform allows for the separation and detailed tracking of original loans and their recaptures, maintaining the distinction between the two. Recaptures should have better performance (i.e., lower CPRs) than original loans.
  2. Performance Comparison: By comparing the performance of original loans and recaptures, investors can gauge the effectiveness of their recapture strategies.
  3. Granular Assumptions: Edge supports highly granular recapture rate assumptions used for projecting cash flows, which can be tailored to specific pools or deals, enhancing the precision of valuation.

A Case Study: Supporting a Large Mortage REIT’s MSR Portfolio Management Regime

A practical example of these capabilities involves a mortgage REIT, which relies on RiskSpan’s platform to manage a large MSR portfolio. Specifically, the Edge platform has enabled the REIT investor to accomplish the following:

  • Capture Transaction-Specific Data: the investor can track and analyze data at the transaction level, maintaining detailed records of each pool’s performance and its recaptures. This allows, for example, investors to review performance with sub-servicers and evaluate whether certain changes can be made to enhance performance either on the existing pool or on future pools.
  • Custom Assumption Setting: The platform allows for custom segmentation and assumption setting for valuation purposes, such as different recapture rates based on prepayment projections or loan age. This provides an ability to more accurately measure future projected cash flows and factor that into valuation of owned MSRs as well as potential purchases.

RiskSpan’s Edge platform offers MSR investors a robust toolset for managing their portfolios with precision not available anywhere else. By enabling pool-specific performance and detailed recapture analysis, Edge helps investors optimize their strategies and enhance portfolio performance. The ability to capture and analyze nuanced data points sets RiskSpan apart, making it a valuable ally in the complex landscape of MSR investments.

MSR investors, contact us to discover how tailored analytics and granular data management can transform your investment strategy and give you a competitive edge.

How RiskSpan and Snowflake Helped a Large Insurance Company Revolutionize Its Data Management

Background

Asset managers are increasingly turning to Snowflake’s cloud infrastructure to address the limitations of outdated databases. Migrating to Snowflake grants them access to a sustainable and secure platform that enables efficient data storage, processing, and analytics. This transition empowers asset managers to streamline operations, improve data accessibility, and reduce costs associated with maintaining on-premises infrastructure.

Client Challenge

A large insurance company’s asset management team was seeking to improve its approach to data management in response to its increasingly complex investment portfolio. The company recognized that transitioning to Snowflake would serve as a foundation for sustainable data analysis for years to come.

Desiring a partner to assist with the transition, the life insurer turned to RiskSpan – a preferred Snowflake partner with substantial experience in database architecture and management.

Specifically, the insurance company sought to achieve the following:

Systems Consolidation: Data stored across multiple transactional systems had contributed to data fragmentation and inefficiencies in data retrieval and analysis. The client sought to establish and maintain a consistent source of asset data for enterprise consumption and reporting.

Improved Reporting Capabilities: Quantifying full risk exposures in fast-moving situations proved challenging, leaving the institution vulnerable to unforeseen market fluctuations. Consequently, the client sought to improve its asset evaluation and risk assessment process by incorporating comprehensive look-through data and classification information. The need for various hierarchical classifications further complicated data access and reporting processes which required streamlining the process of producing ad-hoc exposure reports, which often required several weeks and involved teams of people.

Reduction of Manual Processes: The client needed more automated data extraction processes in order to create exposure reports across different asset classes in a more time-efficient manner with less risk of human error. 

Reduction of Infrastructure Constraints: On-premise infrastructure had defined capacity limitations, hindering scalability and agility in data processing and analysis.

RiskSpan’s Approach and Solutions Implemented

Collaborative Partnership: RiskSpan worked closely with the client’s IT, risk management, and analytics teams throughout the project lifecycle, fostering collaboration and ensuring alignment with organizational goals and objectives.

Comprehensive Assessment: Together, we conducted a thorough assessment of the client’s existing data infrastructure, analytics capabilities, and business requirements to identify pain points and opportunities for improvement.

Strategic Planning: Based on the assessment findings, the collective team developed a strategic roadmap outlining the migration plan to the unified data platform, encompassing asset data consolidation, portfolio analytics enhancement, and reporting automation.

Unified Data Platform: Leveraging modern technologies, including cloud-based solutions and advanced analytics tools, RiskSpan orchestrated the integration of various data sources and analytics capabilities. Together, we consolidated asset data from various transactional systems into a unified data platform, providing a single source of truth for comprehensive asset evaluation and risk assessment.

Data Lineage Tracking: The team employed dbt Labs tools to build, validate, and deploy flexible reporting solutions from the Snowflake cloud infrastructure.  This enabled the tracking of data lineage, adjustments, and ownership.

Daily Exposure Reporting: Leveraging automated analytic pipelines, we enabled real-time generation of exposure reports across different asset classes, enhancing the client’s ability to make timely and informed decisions.

Automated Data Extraction: We automated the data extraction processes, reducing manual intervention and streamlining data retrieval, cleansing, and transformation workflows.

Hierarchical Classification Framework: We implemented a hierarchical classification framework, providing standardized and consistent data hierarchies for improved data access and reporting capabilities.

Transformative Outcomes

Enhanced Decision-making: Implementing advanced analytics capabilities and exposure reporting empowered our client to make informed decisions more quickly, mitigating risks and capitalizing on market opportunities.

Operational Efficiency: Automation of data extraction, analytics modeling, and reporting processes resulted in significant operational efficiencies, reducing time-to-insight and enabling resource reallocation to strategic initiatives.

Scalability and Agility: The migration to a cloud-based infrastructure provides scalability and agility, allowing our client to adapt quickly to changing business needs and accommodate future growth without infrastructure constraints.

Data Governance and Compliance: The implementation of standardized hierarchical classifications strengthened data governance and compliance, ensuring data consistency, integrity, and regulatory adherence. By leveraging Snowflake’s scalable architecture and advanced features, this large asset manager is now positioned to maneuver both its current and future data landscapes. The implementation of Snowflake not only streamlined data management processes but also empowered the organization to extract valuable insights with unprecedented efficiency. As a result, the asset manager can make data-driven decisions confidently, enhance operational agility, and drive sustainable growth in a rapidly evolving market landscape.

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

Case Study: How a leading loan and MSR investor reduced costs with a loan-level approach

Learn more about how one whole loan and MSR investor (a large mortgage REIT) successfully overhauled its analytics computational processing with RiskSpan. The investor migrated from a daily pricing and risk process that relied on tens of thousands of rep lines to one capable of evaluating each of the portfolio’s more than three-and-a-half million loans individually (and how they actually saved money in the process). 

The Situation 

One of the industry’s largest mortgage REITs sought a more forward-thinking way of managing its extensive investment portfolio of mortgage servicing rights (MSR) assets, residential loans and securities. The REIT runs a battery of sophisticated risk management analytics that rely on stochastic modeling. Option-adjusted spread, duration, convexity, and key rate durations are calculated based on more than 200 interest rate simulations.

The investor used rep lines for one main reason: it needed a way to manage computational loads on the server and improve calculation speeds. Secondarily, organizing the loans in this way simplified the reporting and accounting requirements to a degree (loans financed by the same facility were grouped into the same rep line).  

This approach had some significant downsides. Pooling loans by finance facility was sometimes causing loans with different balances, LTVs, credit scores, etc., to get grouped into the same rep line. This resulted in prepayment and default assumptions getting applied to every loan in a rep line that differed from the assumptions that likely would have been applied if the loans were being evaluated individually. 

The Challenge 

The main challenge was the investor’s MSR portfolio—specifically, the volume of loans needing to be run. Having close to 4 million loans spread across nine different servicers presented two related but separate sets of challenges. 

The first set of challenges stemmed from needing to consume data from different servicers whose file formats not only differed from one another but also often lacked internal consistency. Even the file formats from a single given servicer tended to change from time to time. This required RiskSpan to continuously update its data mappings and (because the servicer reporting data is not always clean) modify QC rules to keep up with evolving file formats.  

The second challenge related to the sheer volume of compute power necessary to run stochastic paths of Monte Carlo rate simulations on 4 million individual loans and then discount the resulting cash flows based on option adjusted yield across multiple scenarios. 

And so there were 4 million loans times multiple paths times one basic cash flow, one basic option-adjusted case, one up case, and one down case—it’s evident how quickly the workload adds up. And all this needed to happen on a daily basis. 

To help minimize the computing workload, the innovative REIT had devised a way of running all these daily analytics at a rep-line level—stratifying and condensing everything down to between 70,000 and 75,000 rep lines. This alleviated the computing burden but at the cost of decreased accuracy because they could not look at the loans individually.

The Solution 

The analytics computational processing RiskSpan implemented ignores the rep line concept entirely and just runs the loans. The scalability of our cloud-native infrastructure enables us to take the nearly four million loans and bucket them equally for computation purposes. We run a hundred loans on each processor and get back loan-level cash flows and then generate the output separately, which brings the processing time down considerably. 

For each individual servicer, RiskSpan leveraged its Smart Mapper technology and Configurable QC feature in its Edge Platform to create a set of optimized loan files that can be read and rendered “analytics-ready” very quickly. This enables the loan-level data to be quickly consumed and immediately used for analytics without having to read all the loan tapes and convert them into a format that an analytics engine can understand. Because RiskSpan has “pre-processed” all this loan information, it is immediately available in a format that the engine can easily digest and run analytics on. 

What this means for you

An investor in any mortgage asset benefits from the ability to look at and evaluate loan characteristics individually. The results may need to be rolled up and grouped for reporting purposes. But being able to run the cash flows at the loan level ultimately makes the aggregated results vastly more meaningful and reliable. A loan-level framework also affords whole-loan and securities investors the ability to be sure they are capturing the most important loan characteristics and are staying on top of how the composition of the portfolio evolves with each day’s payoffs. 

CLICK HERE to talk to us and learn how a loan-level approach can help you

Case Study: Using Snowflake to Create Single Family Credit Risk Grids for a Federal Agency

The Client

Government Sponsored Enterprise (GSE)

The Problem

The client sought to transition its ERCF spot capital reporting process from legacy systems and processes to a new, fully integrated system with automated processes. 

This required the re-creation and automation in Snowflake of a legacy report for FHFA consisting of 30 credit risk and risk factor grids rolled up from the loan level.

The Solution

RiskSpan led a cross-functional effort including the data and reporting teams to implement a fully automated report using data and SQL in Snowflake.

The Deliverables

  • Loan attributes re-mapped from legacy data to Snowflake data
  • Reverse-engineered logic mapping attribute values to grid cohorts​
  • Complex and efficient SQL developed in Snowflake to transform loan-level spot capital data into cohorts for credit risk grids​
  • Conversion of 13 million loan records into more than 2,200 grid cells in less than 3 minutes​
  • Design and execution UAT​ in cooperation with the business team
  • Fully automated FHFA credit risk report populated by calling SQL

Case Study: Hadoop to Snowflake Migration

The Client

Government Sponsored Enterprise (GSE)

The Problem

The client sought to improve the performance and forecasting capabilities of its loan valuation and forecast engine. As part of this strategic initiative, the client planned to migrate the underlying platform from Hadoop to the Snowflake Data Cloud to achieve an increase in data loading and querying speeds and an overall optimization of system performance.​

RiskSpan identified a need for project management and implementation planning, as well as data pipeline and ETL migration analysis to ensure a successful integration of the Snowflake data cloud into the loan valuation and forecast engine.​​

The Solution

RiskSpan led the data migration effort for the loan valuation engine and integrated its pipelines from multiple data sources. The RiskSpan team also executed planning, testing, and overall project management of the implementation effort to ensure a high quality, on-schedule delivery.

The Deliverables

  • An integrated project plan with transition from current state to target state and production parallel​
  • A system and data flow comparing existing state to target state​
  • SQL code to efficiently compare 13 million records and more than 100 attributes loaded to Snowflake with legacy data in just 2 minutes.​
  • Review of target state database ETL patterns​
  • Review of loan valuation engine output using data in Snowflake​
  • Comprehensive report presented to Senior Management

How Rithm Capital leverages RiskSpan’s expertise and Edge Platform to enhance data management and achieve economies of scale

 

BACKGROUND

 

One of the nation’s largest mortgage loan and MSR investors was hampered by a complex data ingestion process as well as slow and cumbersome on-prem software for pricing and market risk.

A complicated data wrangling process was taking up significant time and led to delays in data processing. Further, month-end risk and financial reporting processes were manual and time-pressured. The data and risk teams were consumed with maintaining the day-to-day with little time available to address longer-term data strategies and enhance risk and modeling processes.

 

OBJECTIVES

  1. Modernize Rithm’s mortgage loan and MSR data intake from servicers — improve overall quality of data through automated processes and development of a data QC framework that would bring more confidence in the data and associated use cases, such as for calculating historical performance.

  2. Streamline portfolio valuation and risk analytics while enhancing granularity and flexibility through loan-level valuation/risk.

  3. Ensure data availability for accounting, finance and other downstream processes.

  4. Bring scalability and internal consistency to all of the processes above.

THE SOLUTION

THE EDGE WE PROVIDED

By adopting RiskSpan’s cloud-native data management, managed risk, and SaaS solutions, Rithm Capital saved time and money by streamlining its processes

Adopting Edge has enabled Rithm to access enhanced and timely data for better performance tracking and risk management by:

  • Managing data on 5.5 million loans, including source information and monthly updates from loan servicers (with ability in the future to move to daily updates)​
  • Ingesting, validating and normalizing all data for consistency across servicers and assets
  • Implementing automated data QC processes​
  • Performing granular, loan-level analysis​

 

With more than 5 million mortgage loans spread across nine servicers, Rithm needed a way to consume data from different sources whose file formats varied from one another and also often lacked internal consistency. Data mapping and QC rules constantly had to be modified to keep up with evolving file formats. 

Once the data was onboarded Rithm required an extraordinary amount of compute power to run stochastic paths of Monte Carlo rate simulations on all 4 million of those loans individually and then discount the resulting cash flows based on option adjusted yield across multiple scenarios.

To help minimize the computing workload, Rithm had been running all these daily analytics at a rep-line level—stratifying and condensing everything down to between 70,000 and 75,000 rep lines. This alleviated the computing burden but at the cost of decreased accuracy and limited reporting flexibility because results were not at the loan-level.

Enter RiskSpan’s Edge Platform.

Combining the strength of RiskSpan’s subject matter experts, quantitative analysts, and technologists together with the power of the Edge platform, RiskSpan has helped Rithm achieve its objectives across the following areas: 

Data management and performance reporting

  • Data intake and quality control for 9 servicers across loan and MSR portfolios
  • Servicer data enrichment
  • Automated data loads leading to reduced processing time for rolling tapes
  • Ongoing data management support and resolution
  • Historical performance review and analysis (portfolio and universe)

Valuation and risk

  • Daily reporting of MSR, mortgage loan and security valuation and risk analytics based on customized Tableau reports
  • MSR and whole loan valuation/risk calculated based at the loan-level leveraging the scalability of the cloud-native infrastructure
  • Additional scenario analysis and other requirements needed for official accounting and valuation purposes

Interactive tools for portfolio management

  • Fast and accurate tape cracking for purchase/sale decision support
  • Ad-hoc scenario analyses based on customized dials and user-settings

The implementation of these enhanced data and analytics processes and increased ability to scale these processes has allowed Rithm to spend less time on day-to-day data wrangling and focus more on higher-level data analysis and portfolio management. The quality of data has also improved, which has led to more confidence in the data that is used across many parts of the organization.

LET US BUILD YOUR SOLUTION

Models + Data management = End-to-end Managed Process

”The economies of scale we have achieved by being able to consolidate all of our portfolio risk, interactive analytics, and data warehousing onto a single platform are substantial. RiskSpan’s experience with servicer data and MSR analytics have been particularly valuable to us.“​

          — Head of Analytics

RS Edge Platform Implementation Streamlined Processes Reducing Client Resource Support Needs by 46%-VERSION 2

Asset Manager | New York, NY

RiskSpan Applications Provided

Edge Portfolio

MARKET RISK ANALYTICS

Edge-Predictive

MODELS & FORECASTING

Edge-Perspective

MODEL VALIDATION

Edge-Predictive""

GOVERNANCE

ABOUT THE CLIENT

A leading provider of capital and services to the mortgage and financial services industries that leverage their proven investment expertise and identity and invest in assets that offer attractive risk-adjusted returns while also protecting our existing portfolio and generating long-term value for our investors.

PROBLEM

An asset manager sought to replace an inflexible risk system provided by a Wall Street dealer. ​The portfolio was diverse, with a sizable concentration in structured securities and mortgage assets. ​

The legacy analytics system was rigid with no flexibility to vary scenarios or critical investor and regulatory reporting.

CHALLENGE

Lacked a single-solution

Data integrity issues

Inflexible locally installed risk management system

No direct connectivity to downstream systems

Models + Data management = End-to-end Managed Process

HIGHLIGHTS

GET STARTED

Data Library5 Vendors → Single Platform

Loan32% Annual Cost Savings

Private Label SecuritiesIncreased Flexibility

Port AnalyticsAdditional

DOWNLOAD CASE STUDY

SOLUTION

RiskSpan’s Edge Platform delivered a cost-efficient and flexible solution by bundling required data feeds, predictive models for mortgage and structured products, and infrastructure management. ​

The Platform manages and validates the asset manager’s third-party and portfolio data and produces scenario analytics in a secure hosted environment.

TESTIMONIAL

”Our existing daily process for calculating, validating, and reporting on key market and credit risk metrics required significant manual work… [Edge] gets us to the answers faster, putting us in a better position to identify exposures and address potential problems.” ​

          — Managing Director, Securitized Products

EDGE PROVIDED

END-TO-END DATA AND RISK MANAGEMENT PLATFORM 

  • Scalable, cloud native technology
  • Increased flexibility to run analytics at loan level; additional interactive / ad-hoc analytics
  • Reliable accurate data with frequent updates

COST AND OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCIES GAINED

  • Streamlined workflows | Automated processes
  • 32% annual cost savings
  • 46% fewer resources needed for maintenance
  •  

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