Daniel Melo

The two-year trend of improving Russian credit health continued in Q1 2018. Following a slide that lasted four and a half years, the FICO^® Credit Health Index for Russia began climbing in April 2016 and climbed another 2 points last quarter, from 92 to 94. What does this mean? Just as millions of Americans check their FICO Scores to see how their credit is doing, FIC…

The Second Payments Services Directive or PSD2 will bring tremendous changes to the payments world in the coming months. But what does it mean for risk managers? That’s one issue we grappled with at FICO’s recent EMEA Risk Leadership Forum. Today I believe we have more questions than answers. Bear in mind that the goal of PSD2 is to enable customer migration and inc…

The steady growth in the UK economy is matched by a long-running decline in delinquent card payments. FICO’s latest data from the Benchmark Reporting Service shows that delinquencies reached their lowest point in more than two years. For example, the snapshot from December 2014 shows that 0.6 percent of accounts were two cycles (60+ days) delinquent, compared to 0.8…

Just as millions of Americans check their FICO Scores to see how their credit is doing, FICO and the National Bureau of Credit Histories (NBKI), Russia’s leading credit bureau, keep tabs on the health of Russian consumers. If your credit history matched the trend we see in the FICO Credit Health Index, you’d be worried. The FICO Credit Health Index measures Russia’s…

As a parent, I would call this a mixed report card. Here’s the good news: Our latest figures on UK credit cards from the FICO^® Benchmark Reporting Service show that the percentage of student card accounts that have two-cycle balances reached a two-year low in May 2014, before rising slightly in June. The percentage of two-cycle balances to total balances followed thi…

As reported today by FICO and NBKI, Russia’s credit bureau, Russian borrowers’ credit health has been falling for two years, and reached a new low in July. The FICO^® Credit Health Index had reached 98 points, the lowest level since the Index began in 2008, and two points lower than the previous low five years ago.   Why? FICO and NBKI believe this is the…

One day your bank is at the top of the online pricing table for loans, with the most competitive pricing. The next day, your rival is on top. What do you do? If you’re the UK’s Nationwide Building Society, the world’s largest building society with over 14 million members, you can whip your way right back to the top of the table. That’s one of the advantages of th…

In my last post I discussed how important stress testing is to our credit risk management work. Generally, we think of stress testing a bank, or a portfolio of assets. But in fact, we can improve risk management by building customer-level stress testing into our stress test lab. This might sound like a strange idea, but let me digress a little. Risk managers oversee…

Overlimit? Dude, that’s so over. At least, that’s what the latest data from the FICO^® Benchmark Reporting Service suggests. According to our latest report, the percentage of standard credit cards with overlimit balances has fallen from 2.6 percent in March 2012 to 1.9 percent in March 2014. The percentage of cards with overlimit balances also dropped for studen…

In the wake of Lehman Brothers’ failure in 2008, the meaning of “stress test” changed. The worst global financial and economic crisis in the last 80 years created a confidence gap that forced regulators and institutions into simulating worst-case scenarios. In two big waves, 2009 for USA and 2010 for Europe, the majority of the global financial system was tested to t…

Our analysis of UK credit cards shows that the average cardholder had 32.46% of unused exposure in February 2014, compared to 33.38% at the same time the previous year. This slight decrease puts unused exposure at around £41 billion.   This slight change masks a larger fall since 2008, when the average unused exposure was 38.89%. This fall can be attributed…