e-news

Strategy Management: Growing potential with SimRisk training

Changing a strategy in a given credit process is never an easy exercise: from the estimation of possible impact to the implementation in a controlled way there is a lot of analysis to be conducted and decisions to be taken.

Changing a credit strategy is the responsibility of an expert analyst, but an organisation can hardly allow the credit team to experiment and gain experience with the live customer portfolio.

Experian has developed SimRisk, a new kind of Decision Analytics training course, designed to simulate the real-life environment of a business portfolio. The training courses help our clients minimise delays in changing strategies by providing analysts with actual experience of playing out alternative strategies and interpretation results themselves to determine what the impact of the changes have had. A more significant benefit for the client is that analysts are able to ‘learn from their mistakes’ on a fictitious portfolio, rather than actually impacting the bottom-line of the live portfolio.

SimRisk is essentially a business game in which Risk Analysts work in small teams to solve the problems for a fictitious portfolio of Originations strategies for both Personal Loans and Telcos. A further course is also being developed for the Customer Management strategies in a Retail Banking environment. After interpreting a set of reports of previous performance, the teams go through cycles of analysing and setting strategies using Strategy Management software, with the teams monitoring the effects based on key performance measures.
 
One team to recently take part in the course was a group of Credit Risk Analysts from 3 UK .

“This course has been extremely beneficial to the analysts who attended it. It’s great to see a two-day training course for the practical use of SDS in the Telco Environment. The participants enjoyed it; I’m now looking forward to seeing the skills and methodologies learnt being translated into real business benefit”,commented 3 UK’s Simon North, when summarising the benefits for his team.

The teams also enjoyed the competitive aspect of the course; “A great approach. The competitive angle greatly added to the enjoyment”, and one participant summarised the course with the comment “Hands-on is always better than just being spoken at.”

Since its launch in 2007, the SimRisk course has been run for over 120 client analysts and delegates, who have provided very positive feedback.  Paul Middleton, a director responsible for a team of analysts at Standard Bank South Africa, summarised the benefits to his team:

“This is the best course my team has been on in a very long time. It created a huge amount of energy and really put into perspective the principles that underpin credit lending. Now we just need to put this learning into practice…”

Jim Nowell
Business Consultant
Decision Analytics
Experian

Contact us for more information or to register for SimRisk training