So you’re updating all your modeling assumptions. Don’t forget about governance.

Modelers have now been grappling with how COVID-19 should affect assumptions and forecasts for nearly two months. This exercise is raising at least as many questions as it is answering.

No credit model (perhaps no model at all) is immune. Among the latest examples are mortgage servicers having to confront how to bring their forbearance and loss models into alignment with new realities.

These new realities are requiring servicers to model unprecedented macroeconomic conditions in a new and changing regulatory environment. The generous mortgage forbearance provisions ushered in by March’s CARES Act are not tantamount to loan forgiveness. But servicers probably shouldn’t count on reimbursement of their forbearance advances until loan liquidation (irrespective of what form the payoff takes).

The ramifications of these costs and how servicers should modeling them is a central topic to be addressed in a Mortgage Bankers Association webinar on Wednesday, May 13, “Modeling Forbearance Losses in the COVID-19 world” (free for MBA members). RiskSpan CEO Bernadette Kogler will lead a panel consisting of Faith Schwartz, Suhrud Dagli, and Morgan Snyder in a discussion of the forbearance’s regulatory implications, the limitations of existing models, and best practices for modeling forbearance-related advances, losses, and operational costs.

Models, of course, are only as good as their underlying data and assumptions. When it comes to forbearance modeling, those assumptions obviously have a lot to do with unemployment, but also with the forbearance take-up rate layered on top of more conventional assumptions around rates of delinquency, cures, modifications, and bankruptcies.

The unique nature of this crisis requires modelers to expand their horizons in search of applicable data. For example, GSE data showing how delinquencies trend in rising unemployment scenarios might need to be supplemented by data from Greek or other European crises to better simulate extraordinarily high unemployment rates. Expense and liquidation timing assumptions will likely require looking at GSE and private-label data from the 2008 crisis. Having reliable assumptions around these is critically important because liquidity issues associated with servicing advances are often more an issue of timing than of anything else.

Model adjustments of the magnitude necessary to align them with current conditions almost certainly qualify as “material changes” and present a unique set of challenges to model validators. In addition to confronting an expanded workload brought on by having to re-validate models that might have been validated as recently as a few months ago, validators must also effectively challenge the new assumptions themselves. This will likely prove challenging absent historical context.

RiskSpan’s David Andrukonis will address many of these challenges—particularly as they relate to CECL modeling—as he participates in a free webinar, “Model Risk Management and the Impacts of COVID-19,” sponsored by the Risk Management Association. Perhaps fittingly, this webinar will run concurrent with the MBA webinar discussed above.

As is always the case, the smoothness of these model-change validations will depend on the lengths to which modelers are willing to go to thoroughly document their justifications for the new assumptions. This becomes particularly important when introducing assumptions that significantly differ from those that have been used previously. While it will not be difficult to defend the need for changes, justifying the individual changes themselves will prove more challenging. To this end, meticulously documenting every step of feature selection during the modeling process is critical not only in getting to a reliable model but also in ensuring an efficient validation process.

Documenting what they’re doing and why they’re doing it is no modeler’s favorite part of the job—particularly when operating in crisis mode and just trying to stand up a workable solution as quickly as possible. But applying assumptions that have never been used before always attracts increased scrutiny. Modelers will need to get into the habit of memorializing not only the decisions made regarding data and assumptions, but also the other options considered, and why the other considered options were ultimately passed over.

Documenting this decision-making process is far easier at the time it happens, while the details are fresh in a modeler’s mind, than several months down the road when people inevitably start probing.

Invest in the “ounce of prevention” now. You’ll thank yourself when model validation comes knocking.