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......
The Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) and Counterparty Risk – Ready…
I recently attended a Global Financial Markets Association (GFMA) event in New York to learn more about the development of the global Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) system – a 20-digit, alpha-numeric code that is the emerging standard for identifying counterparties and market participants in financial transactions. At first, LEI didn’t seem like an exciting topic......
FI Consulting at the SAS Global Forum
Several FI consultants (Derek Davison, Larry Roadcap, Christina Prevalsky, Jeremy D’Antoni, and Jincheng Yu) attended last month’s SAS Global Forum in Dallas, which as always was an impressive and informative event highlighting how big data and analytics continue to evolve at an ever increasing speed. SAS elicits a rare enthusiasm and loyalty from users that......
Three Reasons Model Management Should Be in the Spotlight
Following the last several months’ sprint to finish up the last round of CCAR, Dodd-Frank and NCUA regulatory stress tests, bank executives might be tempted to take a breather before the next round of scrambling gets underway. The chance to rest would certainly be well earned. At GARP’s National Convention in New York last month,......
The Two Faces of Change: Current Expected Credit Losses
FI Consulting Manager, Joe Feldmann, was invited to speak at the 2014 Mortgage Bankers Association’s accounting conference on the recent Accounting Standards Update (ASU), Financial Instruments – Credit Losses, Subtopic 825-15. Underneath the dryly named ASU is one of the most significant paradigm shifts to emerge in recent years from the accounting world (and, we......