The TruEnd-procedure: Treating trailing zero-valued balances in credit data

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Botha, Arno, Verster, Tanja, Bester, Roelinde
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Botha, Arno
Verster, Tanja
Bester, Roelinde
author_facet Botha, Arno
Verster, Tanja
Bester, Roelinde
contents A novel procedure is presented for finding the true but latent endpoints within the repayment histories of individual loans. The monthly observations beyond these true endpoints are false, largely due to operational failures that delay account closure, thereby corrupting some loans. Detecting these false observations is difficult at scale since each affected loan history might have a different sequence of trailing zero (or very small) month-end balances. Identifying these trailing balances requires an exact definition of a "small balance", which our method informs. We demonstrate this procedure and isolate the ideal small-balance definition using two different South African datasets. Evidently, corrupted loans are remarkably prevalent and have excess histories that are surprisingly long, which ruin the timing of risk events and compromise any subsequent time-to-event model, e.g., survival analysis. Having discarded these excess histories, we demonstrably improve the accuracy of both the predicted timing and severity of risk events, without materially impacting the portfolio. The resulting estimates of credit losses are lower and less biased, which augurs well for raising accurate credit impairments under IFRS 9. Our work therefore addresses a pernicious data error, which highlights the pivotal role of data preparation in producing credible forecasts of credit risk.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_17008
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The TruEnd-procedure: Treating trailing zero-valued balances in credit data
Botha, Arno
Verster, Tanja
Bester, Roelinde
Risk Management
Statistical Finance
Applications
A novel procedure is presented for finding the true but latent endpoints within the repayment histories of individual loans. The monthly observations beyond these true endpoints are false, largely due to operational failures that delay account closure, thereby corrupting some loans. Detecting these false observations is difficult at scale since each affected loan history might have a different sequence of trailing zero (or very small) month-end balances. Identifying these trailing balances requires an exact definition of a "small balance", which our method informs. We demonstrate this procedure and isolate the ideal small-balance definition using two different South African datasets. Evidently, corrupted loans are remarkably prevalent and have excess histories that are surprisingly long, which ruin the timing of risk events and compromise any subsequent time-to-event model, e.g., survival analysis. Having discarded these excess histories, we demonstrably improve the accuracy of both the predicted timing and severity of risk events, without materially impacting the portfolio. The resulting estimates of credit losses are lower and less biased, which augurs well for raising accurate credit impairments under IFRS 9. Our work therefore addresses a pernicious data error, which highlights the pivotal role of data preparation in producing credible forecasts of credit risk.
title The TruEnd-procedure: Treating trailing zero-valued balances in credit data
topic Risk Management
Statistical Finance
Applications
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.17008