By: Kari Michel In my last blog I gave an overview of monitoring reports for new account acquisition decisions listing three main categories that reports typically fall into:  (1) population stability; (2) decision management; (3) scorecard performance. Today, I want to focus on population stability.   Applicant pools may change over time as a result of new marketing strategies, changes in product mix, pricing updates, competition, economic changes or a combination of these. Population stability reports identify acquisition trends and the degree to which the applicant pool has shifted over time, including the scorecard components driving the shift in custom credit scoring models. Population stability reports include: • Actual versus expected score distribution • Actual versus expected scorecard characteristics distributions (available with custom models) • Mean applicant scores • Volumes, approval and booking rates These types of reports provide information to help monitor trends over time, rather than spikes from month to month.  Understanding the trends allows one to be proactive in determining if the shifts warrant changes to lending policies or cut-off scores. Population stability is only one area that needs to be monitored; in my next blog I will discuss decision management reports.  

By: Wendy Greenawalt On any given day, US credit bureaus contain consumer trade data on approximately four billion trades. Interpreting data and defining how to categorize the accounts and build attributes, models and decisioning tools can and does change over time, due to the fact that the data reported to the bureaus by lenders and/or servicers also changes. Over the last few years, new data elements have enabled organizations to create attributes to identify very specific consumer behavior. The challenge for organizations is identifying what reporting changes have occurred and the value that the new consumer data can bring to decisioning. For example, a new reporting standard was introduced nearly a decade ago which enabled lenders to report if a trade was secured by money or real property. Before the change, lenders would report the accounts as secured trades making it nearly impossible to determine if the account was a home equity line of credit or a secured credit card. Since then, lender reporting practices have changed and, now, reports clearly state that home equity lines of credit are secured by property making it much easier to delineate the two types of accounts from one another. By taking advantage of the most current credit bureau account data, lenders can create attributes to capture new account types.  They can also capture information (such as: past due amounts; utilization; closed accounts and derogatory information including foreclosure; charge-off and/or collection data) to make informed decisions across the customer life cycle.

Understanding vintage pools in reference to vintage analysis