Four Key Questions When Estimating Current Expected Credit Losses (CECL)
BY ROBERT CHANG AND MARK JORDAN, FI CONSULTING Under the FASB current expected credit loss (CECL) accounting standard, public entities are required to estimate losses over the contractual term of the financial asset or group of financial assets. However, this requirement is eased to allow entities to make or obtain “reasonable and supportable” forecasts of......
Banks with Ontology and Knowledge Graph Capabilities well-positioned to meet…
FI Consulting’s Mark Jordan co-authored a blog with Element 22 discussing the importance of data governance and accessibility. Recent surveys find that many institutions are still in the planning stage for CECL, and that obtaining data necessary to support model development is among their most pressing tasks. In the recent past certain banks have met......
Take An Integrated View of Mission, Cost, and Risk in…
BY JOSH MEIKRANTZ, FI CONSULTING Introduction Federal credit agencies expend resources—in the form of costs and risk— in order to achieve policy missions. While agencies measure program credit costs and performance against mission, typically these efforts are undertaken independently and risk is not considered at all. Government credit agencies should assess costs, mission, and risk......
WHITE PAPER: Current Expected Credit Loss (CECL)
Lessons from the Federal Government Experience with Lifetime Expected Credit Loss Federal loan programs that oversee loan and loan guarantee portfolios — such as the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) Mortgage Insurance Program, Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Home Loan Program, and the Department of Agriculture (USDA) Rural Development Program......
Managing the Federal Balance Sheet: The Allure of Loan Sales
The idea of monetizing the federal government’s massive credit portfolio by selling government-held loans into the market surfaces periodically. Loan asset sales have several features attractive to policymakers. They bring in private capital to support areas traditionally served by government programs. They take risk off the government’s balance sheet. They can also appear to offer......
RInno – An Open Source Solution to Help Install R…
If you are trying to improve your company’s data science infrastructure, you will need people who can code in R, Python, or Java. Doing data science without staff with these skills would be like trying to build a database without staff who know SQL. R, Python and Java perennially top the list of tools Data......
Brainstorming to Project Planning 101
Recently, I had the privilege to lead the facilitation of a brainstorming and project planning session on behalf of a federal government client. As I prepared for the two-day session with 30 people, I reflected on the challenge of how to engage a group of geographically and programmatically diverse participants. People often groan at the......
Perspectives on Credit Risk Model Development from Recent CCAR Validations
At FI Consulting, we develop, validate and implement a wide variety of credit risk models for GSEs, banks, credit unions, and Federal agencies across residential and commercial real estate, small business and consumer portfolios. In terms of model validation, clients often look to us for surge support to temporarily increase their capacity during crunch periods......
FI Consulting: Implementing Reusable and Open Source Software
On March 10th, Tony Scott, the U.S. Chief Information Officer, published a blog post titled Leveraging American Ingenuity through Reusable and Open Source Software and released a corresponding draft of the Federal Source Code Policy for public comment. In his blog post he argues the use of Open Source Software (OSS) across government agencies will......
Fair Value for Federal Credit Programs: Start With Disclosure
The calls on Capitol Hill for fair value (FV) budgeting of federal credit programs resurfaced earlier this year with the Budget and Accounting Transparency Act of 2015 (S. 399/H.R. 119). Like bills introduced in past years, the Act calls for changing credit program budgeting from the current Federal Credit Reform Act of 1990 (FCRA) approach......