A recent analytics software implementation will help financial institution CIBC improve its business workflow, bank sources say. The Toronto-based bank is using a credit scoring application from vendor SAS Institute Inc. to speed up its current process of evaluating the credit worthiness of its customers.
According to N.Y.-based IT research firm Datamonitor, compliance and risk management is a key technology driver among retail banks. In the firm’s survey of 100 IT executives at U.S. banks, 80 per cent said enabling compliance with changing regulatory requirements is the most important driver of core systems investment in 2005.
The SAS Credit Scoring software will improve the bank’s ability to quickly produce credit risk scorecards and perform advanced analytics on its more than nine million customers, said Sanjiv Talwar, vice-president of retail risk management at CIBC,
In general terms, credit scoring software helps financial institutions to quickly and reliably interpret customer credit reports and related data using algorithms or a predictive scoring model. The software is intended to speed up this process, SAS said, and allows firms such as CIBC to develop, validate, deploy and track credit scorecards in-house.
The client/server software supports batch processing and asynchronous model training, SAS said, which is designed to improve performance for interactive grouping and analyses of large datasets resulting in faster turnaround of credit scores.
The software is expected to save CIBC time and money in processing customer data, while also helping to comply with the Basel II standard, Talwar said. Basel II, also known as the Revised International Capital Framework, is an international standard for measuring risk. Score code can be generated in C and Java to deploy the model in real-time or batch in either SAS or environments outside of SAS, the company said.