This Month's Featured Course(s):
Baesens Brings Basel II Course to SAS' US Students
Bart Baesens is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Decision Sciences and Information Management at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium and in the School of Management at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom. His research focuses on the use of data mining and machine learning techniques for credit scoring and customer relationship management (CRM) applications.
Now Baesens is teaming up with SAS to offer Credit Scoring Solutions and Modeling for Basel II Using SAS in January 2007. The course will be offered in the U.S. on both the East and West coasts. Seats are limited, so register today.
Read an interview with Baesens about this course and about Basel II:
Who is the audience for Credit Scoring Solutions and Modeling for Basel II? The audience consists of everyone involved in developing credit risk models and monitoring their behavior and performance. This includes model developers, model auditors, credit risk managers and ICT developers, but also people from regulatory organizations and authorities.
What is Basel II? The Basel II Capital Accord has been put forward by the Bank of International Settlements as a way to further promote stability and security in the international financial banking and credit lending community. It provides financial institutions with clear guidelines to calculate a regulatory amount of safety capital so as to be well-protected against unexpected losses due to credit, operational and market risk.
Who is affected by Basel II? All financial institutions granting credit using whatever type of products are being affected by the Basel II Capital Accord. Also, third parties such as companies providing consulting services, rating agencies, credit bureaus and regulatory authorities are closely affected by the Basel II regulation.
Why is Basel II important? The importance of Basel II stems from the fact that it provides banks with a well-defined and outlined framework according to which they can deal with credit, market and operational risk. Furthermore, once Basel II models have been successfully developed and deployed, cross-fertilization opportunities, such as improved credit pricing and securitization, will arise.
How does this course help students meet Basel II requirements? In this course, we discuss how Basel II-compliant credit-risk systems can be built starting from raw data. All model-building steps - sampling, data preprocessing, scorecard modeling, ratings definition and calibration, model monitoring and validation - will be discussed in great detail. The course aims at providing a sound mix of theoretical and technical insights, as well as practical implementation details, illustrated by several real-life cases. The course format is highly interactive.
What can students expect to walk away with? Students can expect to gain a deeper knowledge of how to develop credit risk models for Basel II. Knowledge will be gained about how the different methodologies, concepts and statistics work together, but also about how they can be efficiently implemented and automated using SAS software. This will lead to increased productivity and efficiency when putting the ideas into practice.
What qualifies you to teach this course? My academic background allows me to keep in close touch with state-of-the-art research in credit risk management. I regularly publish papers in well-respected journals and/or do presentations of my research findings at conferences and workshops. I also often tutor, advise and provide consulting support to international financial institutions with respect to their credit risk management and credit scoring policies. This gives me an ideal mix of ingredients to teach this course.
What most excites you about teaching this course? I have taught this course a number of times around the globe already. The feedback and interaction from the participants are always very positive and motivate me. Teaching this course also allows me to stay in close touch with what's going on in the financial world and stimulates me to think about how my academic research can translate into business benefits and improved credit risk management.