Final presentation for me this morning is Gerard Chrispie of HBOS - Halifax Bank of Scotland, the fourth largest bank in the UK with some 22M customers and assets of over $1Bn. Gerard presented on how HBOS is using Model Builder and an analytic team to build analytic models to help with the changing UK financial services environment (rising rates, rising insolvencies, house price and mortgage issues and so on).
HBOS applied Fair Isaac's People/Process/Yield approach to develop an analytics team over the last couple of years. Part of this was a realization that needed a way to produce more models, especially more scorecard models. In particular, for the cards group, as they are growing very fast. They have a range of models for application, behavior, bakruptcy, credit abuse, response and conversion. They are using Model Builder and find that variable/characteristic analysis, binning, weight of evidence graphing, reject inference, and validation are their favorite features. They get a significant increase in throughput from using Model Builder and also like the way models are documented - they are very easy to approve for risk. The process enforcement aspects also help with growing the team. They keep a scorecard of Model Builder features and in general are pleased and find it is doing well, though there are areas well there is a need for work (as you would expect with a fairly new product). Indeed they are finding that modelers are increasingly choosing to use Model Builder in place of some of their other analytic tools (though they still use SAS for most of their data preparation, as you would expect).
One of his key findings was that broad adoption requires the establishment of a modeling software ecosystem and support team. They are also working on improving their model deployment and execution approach to reduce the time to get a model into production, they also plan to use PMML and this is a Model Builder feature in which they are very interested.
It was great to hear from a happy, established Model Builder customer.
Here are some of Gerard's slides:
- Building an Analytics Team
- Framework for Building a team - People, Process, Yield
- Model Builder for application scorecards
- Report card for Model Builder
- Lessons Learned
- The use of different technologies to build behavioral scorecards
- Summary showing time line and growth in models
