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Credit Risk Assessment: The New Lending System for Borrowers, Lenders, and Investors

About the Book

book cover Credit Risk Assessment: The New Lending System for Borrowers, Lenders, and Investors
By: Clark R. Abrahams and Mingyuan Zhang
ISBN: 978-0-470-46168-6

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With the subprime market in crisis and its effects trickling down to Wall Street, this timely book provides a framework on how financial institutions can improve their credit assessment system. A comprehensive new credit risk framework is needed, a hybrid approach that combines the best that technology can offer with expert human judgment. Clark Abrahams and Mingyuan Zhang's Credit Risk Assessment: The New Lending System for Borrowers, Lenders, and Investors presents this framework for small business and consumer lending and explains how it can be implemented to improve a financial institution's credit assessment system.

The book discusses how a comprehensive credit assessment framework can extend existing credit scoring to embrace all relevant factors and business contexts so that lenders can classify credit risk in a more effective, transparent, and forward-looking manner. Various practical examples show how to implement the new framework. Credit Risk Assessment promotes a new generation of credit models that ensures that true risk is captured and that a loan is affordable over its life, which has obvious implications for both intervening in the mortgage crisis and preventing future financial disruption. This book is a valuable reference for lending and credit practitioners in both developed and developing countries, where credit products are rapidly evolving.

About the Authors

author photo Clark Abrahams, director of fair banking at SAS, has more than thirty years of experience in the financial services industry. Prior to joining SAS, Abrahams was the chief risk officer for Fidelity National Corporation and senior vice president for Bank of America. He has also held positions with Fair Isaac & Co., Standard Oil of Indiana, the Bank of California, and Barclays Bank. A frequent speaker at events sponsored by the American Banking Association, the American Conference Institute, the Bank Administration Institute, and the International Institute for Research, Abrahams serves on an advisory council of the Brookings Institution's Urban Markets Initiative. Abrahams is the co-author of the book Fair Lending Compliance: Intelligence and Implications for Credit Risk Management.
author photo Mingyuan (Sunny) Zhang is a solutions architect for SAS Financial Services. Over the last ten years with SAS, he has successfully developed and implemented many forecasting, data mining, optimization, and risk management solutions for various industries. Previously, he served as an economic and financial analyst for a leading telecommunications consulting firm. A member of the American Statistical Association, Zhang holds an MBA and a PhD in financial economics. Zhang is the co-author of the book Fair Lending Compliance: Intelligence and Implications for Credit Risk Management.

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