Bridging the academic-practitioner divide at the Credit Scoring and Credit Control Conference XVIII

When I first conceived of this show, I actually assumed it would be more academic in nature, more about the practical 'how' than the strategic 'how' as it were. When it went live, though, it quickly became clear that it would be more about fintech, more about uncommon global viewpoints. But that's not to say that I don't still love getting into the weeds of credit scoring minutiae!

So I am delighted to have weaselled my way into the Credit Scoring and Credit Control Conference that's happening in Edinburgh this summer. You have a week left to get early bird pricing if you want to be there, too (find me there, and I'll even buy the first beer)

I'll be there in person from August 30 to September 1st to see what's happening on the cutting edge and to record some interviews, but first, I wanted to learn more about the conference’s goals, its philosophy, and its history, and about how and why it has garnered such a strong following among credit professionals. Seriously, I've spoken at Fintech Nexus and will recording live at Money20/20, but it's the CSCCC that makes my credit friends swoon 😅

In this episode, I’m speaking to the organising committee:

Professor Galina Andreeva, Credit Research Centre, University of Edinburgh Business School

Professor Jonathan Crook, Credit Research Centre, University of Edinburgh Business School

Mr David Edelman, Caledonia Credit Consultancy

Professor Christophe Mues, University of Southampton

The Credit Research Centre is at home online at https://www.crc.business-school.ed.ac.uk/home (and at home in the real world at the Univeristy of Edinburgh Business School)

You can (and should) visit the conference’s pages to learn more at https://www.crc.business-school.ed.ac.uk/conferences

Or register for the conference directly: https://www.efdelegates.ed.ac.uk/Registration/Welcome.aspx?e=CC77C1B5999C8A6D95050A7E80553367

You can learn more about myself, Brendan le Grange, on my LinkedIn page (feel free to connect), my action-adventure novels are on Amazon, some versions even for free, and my work with ConfirmU and our gamified psychometric scores is at https://confirmu.com/ and on episode 24 of this very show https://www.howtolendmoneytostrangers.show/episodes/episode-24

If you have any feedback, questions, or if you would like to participate in the show, please feel free to reach out to me via the contact page on this site.

Regards,

Brendan

The full written transcript, with timestamps, is below:

Prof Jonathan Crook 0:00

As far as we can make out, this is the largest (and has been for many years) academic-practitioner credit risk conference in the world.

And the audience of very knowledgeable and very specialised. So if you give a talk here, you get really high quality feedback.

Oh, and if you're a runner, Brendan, bring your running shoes because we have a run before the conference or during the conference round Arthur's Seat.

Brendan Le Grange 0:20

I might have to edit that one out, otherwise, my wife is going to make me do it! But okay, okay, well, I'll join you.

I started my degree on a path that led to chartered accountancy, pivoted towards structured finance a few years in, and then fell into the consumer credit industry. And almost everyone I speak to on the show has a similar story - not because no one wants to do study credit, I'd venture, but because it feels rare to be given the chance to.

But it is possible.

The Credit Research Centre at the University of Edinburgh Business School was founded in 1997 to conduct research into the theory and practice of all aspects of credit, but especially consumer credit. In fact, if you'd like to bolster your own qualifications, you may be interested in their MSc in banking, innovation and risk analytics, or even a PhD.

But they also put on a genuinely world famous - in certain niches - Credit Scoring and Credit Control Conference. I've heard great things about this event but I have never quite been able to go until now, because I'm delighted to say that I'll be there, with my microphones, from August 30 to September 1 this year.

Welcome to How to Lend Money to Strangers with Brendan le Grange.

I know from my own experience in analytics, that it's not good to use personal anecdotes to base a theory on, but I fell into consumer credit by chance and that seems to be the case for the vast majority of people, that they studied something else and they got into credit risk somewhat accidentally.

So I would like to start with you Professor Jonathan Crook, as the founding director of the CRC, the Credit Research Centre.

Prof Jonathan Crook 2:17

So I really started work on credit risk models in about 1989 when Lyn Thomas, who was then our professor of management science, and I gained an ESRC research grant. Several people had became interested in credit scoring, people like John Banasik, John Glenn, Jake Ansell, and we had close connections with banks and lenders

And so in 1997, I started the Credit Research Centre. The aim of the centre is basically to carry out research into theory and practice of trade, but especially consumer credit from all angles: we train postgrads, mainly PhD students, but also MSC students. We organise conferences, seminars, workshops, short courses, we do consultancy, we host visiting researchers from all sectors.

The overall aim is to have impact or, in other words, to make society better, to ensure fairness in credit allocation, and so on.

It's always been completely independent of financial institutions and of regulators. And in 1997, when the Centre was created, we were the only UK concentration of researchers in the area and of course that's not true anymore.

And then in 2006, we created the UK's Personal Finance Research Centre and that spans Edinburgh, Southampton, and Imperial. So the research that we have done over the years has covered almost all areas of consumer risk modelling, stress testing models for bank capital regulation, technical aspects of credit scoring - one of the first papers using machine learning, I published with colleagues from University of Virginia back in the early 1990s - interpretability of machine learning, affordability, over indebtedness, etc.

Many people have joined Galina, for example, Raffaella Calabrese, Fernando Moreira, and many others. So we've generally tried to train many people to feed them into the industry and help regulators.

Brendan Le Grange 4:16

And two years ago, you handed over the reins of the CRC to Professor Galina Andreeva. Galina, since we do have you here as well, your background's also very deep in terms of credit risk, with your PhD thesis being on the topic, oh, 20 years ago now, so a lot of experience in the space.

The CRC today, where's it fitting in this ecosystem of professionals in the credit risk space?

Prof Galina Andreeva 4:35

Thank you, Brendan. My love affair with credit scoring actually started even before the PhD. Formally my PhD was in management, but the topic was on credit scoring, developing the scoring model for several European countries. But my first encounter with credit scoring was during my MSc in operational research and management science.

I was fortunate to have a specific course on credit scoring, taught by Lyn Thomas at the time. I'm really proud that now I'm teaching a similar course to a different MSC students. And now this degree is being rebranded as banking, innovation and risk analytics.

After my MSc I proceeded to do that PhD, and after my PhD, I briefly worked in Bank of Scotland - this experience was hugely valuable, I still rely on some things that I learned there.

And the Credit Research Centre was really instrumental in supporting all these ways of collaborating with the industry, through students stations, invited guest lectures, consultancies, research projects, to build a community, a community of credit analysts or credit researchers, and to foster productive and mutually beneficial collaborations.

The Centre is truly unique. I can't think of any equivalent one, not only in the UK, we're well known in the UK, but also outside UK. There are lots of financial research centres - and now of course, there's many FinTech centres - but I don't think any of these centres really concentrate on this niche area of credit risk and credit risk modelling.

Brendan Le Grange 6:43

You mentioned the rebranding, I think it shows how credit risk strategy has changed from as a very technical, back end function that very few people understood or knew about, to a world where it is about banking innovation and risk analytics. The credit scoring, the credit modelling, that practice, that skill set has come right to the fore now where it is part of banking innovation, this is not just some technical person, you know, one out of 20,000 employees sitting in a back room that really can shape a lending product or lending offering to the market and be a big part of driving innovation.

And I think that's it speaks to the dramatic change that's happened in the time that the the centres been and the role that so yeah, you're you're graduates and you're consulting and your research is playing, it's now front and centre.

And let me start bringing us towards that output and that research, because the five of us are together now, because the 18th meeting of the biennial Credit Scoring and Credit Control Conference will be taking place in Edinburgh, between Wednesday 30th August and Friday 1st September of this year.

And it's a rare opportunity, I'd say to bridge the academic practitioner divide. And I say 'rare' because I think when you're working within a lending organisation, the sorts of conferences that capture the bulk of the budget are the flashy FinTech ones talking about new product innovations, the more blue sky sort of stuff. While the people that are sitting there practising the current state of the art, that are building models, don't always get a chance to come together and to hear what's happening in best practice to share with the colleagues and their peers.

How are we using artificial intelligence in scorecards? What are regulators saying? How do we react to that?

So I'm delighted to have the full Organising Committee of that event here with me. We've already met Professor Jonathan Crook and Professor Galina Andreeva, but we've also got Professor Christophe Mues, Professor of Data Science and Information Systems at the University of Southampton and David Edelman of Caledonia Credit Consultancy.

I'm going to move from the academics to the practitioner side with you, David, previously a risk director for major Irish and Scottish banks and non-bank lenders, and then for the last two decades, a specialist credit risk consultant.

The theme of the event is bridging this academic practitioner divide. How do you as a practitioner, see this happening at the event?

David Edelman 9:14

I was gonna say I'm not sure 'divide' is the right word, but it's the one we've been using for a long time as a as a strapline. But the conferences is a forum for people to actually share ideas.

If we go back to the very first conference, we had analytic people from competing vendors having a serious debate with a chalkboard and chalk, they were actually rubbing each other's arguments out! So whether you call them practitioners because they were selling things or technical people, you know, they'd already bridged that themselves within their organisation.

Now the research either comes from individual organisations, mostly our lenders and vendors, or it comes from a research council's who will also have represent And as of the end users, there's no point in the Research Centre going away and doing a piece of research that no one's actually interested in finding out about. So it has been demand led research to a great extent.

If you come up through the banking route, you might think that all universities do is contemplate their navels all the time. And that's no longer a viable model.

There are some some differences, though, which is why it's important to have a forum. I mean, from the very first conference, we made sure we were non-aligned: so we're not aligned to any particular supplier, any particular set of products, people can bring their own ideas. And that's very important, because then you do get as close as possible to free exchange of ideas of thoughts, and people can learn in a fairly benign environment.

I mean, we had one, one company who would send their recent graduate intake to us to the conference in the first week of work, just to learn about the industry, it wasn't so much about learning some of the technical stuff, just learning how the industry works.

The other thing that's certainly moved on a lot, of course, it's things like publications. I mean, when I moved into credit scoring in 1986, I did a library search and I think I found either three or four published papers, none of which really taught me anything. One of them, I remember, was a famous paper said, basically, ask them 10 questions and then count up how many yeses you get - which was probably still better than someone making a subjective decision, because at least you could monitor whether you'd set the cutoff in the right place. This gap as certainly narrowed in recent years.

So we have a lot of let's call the big banks who will have 100 plus people in their analytic department. Now, they're not all building models, some of them do data quality, some are do governance, but they have large departments. And in there, there will be some very technical people. And certainly my experience is that will be one or two people in that department who you don't let speak to anyone outside the department, but they're very, very bright and very, very good at their jobs.

And you have other people who act as liasons, so in a sense, some of the organisations have bridged that gap themselves internally.

Prof Jonathan Crook 11:53

David's absolutely right.

I think I've mentioned the interaction, two way interaction between the conference and academics, but there's also the availability of ideas. So the conference will have over 100 papers presented, and many academics from Southampton, Edinburgh, and a few other places to be there. And you can talk to practitioners and talk about ideas and also about the problems that they actually face.

And if there are regulators, you can talk about the problems that individuals have an experience in terms of over indebtedness, and things like that. So there's genuine two way interaction or in a very informal way, and a lot of research and many ideas from academia have gone back to industry through the conference.,

David Edelman 12:34

I just want to just finish with one other thing, the Basel Accords, because there's two major impacts of Basel accords: first of all, they need credit scoring, and other areas in data quality data analytics are requirement for consumer lending and, secondly, they made senior management in the lending organisations much more responsible and liable for what was going on in the departments. So they needed to be better informed and educated.

Brendan Le Grange 12:58

These are no longer something that can be left, just in the background. In part, yeah, because the likes of Basel II mean people do need to understand what's happening. That's important. And then, of course, just the role that credit and data plays - I think, an event that anybody who is in the space should definitely be be looking at.

Professor Mues, you're also studying credit scoring and applications of analytics in consumer lending. Just you've made, I guess, the understandable decision to do it down on the sunny south coast.

I think credit scoring is probably one of the academic fields where theory and practice run particularly close it when we talk about marketing and human resources, things like that can be quite muddied about what's actually practical in the real world versus theory. But when we're talking about the numbers, you know, to some extent, the numbers are the numbers.

So I'd be quite interested to hear from you, what are your particular areas of interest, but also, what do you see as the cutting edge in the credit risk space?

Prof Christophe Mues 13:57

Thanks, Brendan.

I've been living and working in Southampton for a long time now. Actually, it was back in 2004 that I moved from my home country, Belgium, where I did my PhD at KU Leuven to the UK. It wasn't just for the weather, although, yeah, but I think the key reason, or one of the key reasons, is they gave me the chance to work with Lyn Thomas who had moved from Edinburgh to Southampton at that time, and he has always been at the forefront of credit scoring research really. So that that was a great opportunity for me, and also a good colleague and friend of mine, Bart Baesens, was working there as a part time lecturer at the time as well. And he still is now.

My key focus has really been on using machine learning, or AI if you'd rather call it that. And most recently, deep learning.

For example, it's almost 20 years ago now that we published a paper on how to generate explanations from a neural network, which was quite new at the time. It picked up a little bit since then! And when Basel II came along, which was really important for a lot of us because it increased the attention on the whole area, I started looking at not just modelling the probability of default, but also loss given default, exposure at default.

Because it's not just important to understand that with Basel II anymore, whether you're likely to default on a loan, but also what the loss might be. So, so these are topics that I started looking at.

And in some of my recent work, I've been working with our PhD students, and Cristian Bravo, and others to apply deep learning techniques to various alternative data sources. So alternative data is another thing.

For example, we've been investigating the predictiveness of things like text data, such as that contain the loan officer reports, LIDAR elevation data, that tells us a bit about the geographical area to remote sensing data and trying to infer things about a geographical location, that work data telling us how companies are linked with each other, for example, because their supply chain partners or their other relationships between them, that in turn means that credit risk might propagate over these networks. And we can take that into account and the modelling.

So yeah, in my work, AI and machine learning features heavily, but usually applied to a particular analytics challenge.

So the question then is, wherein lies the value of applying this or that cutting edge technique in the setting? Can I extract something from a particular data source that traditional methods don't give me? What's the performance lift I get? And how do I explain what I'm getting? So that's sort of a common theme. And in some of the research that I'm doing.

Brendan Le Grange 16:42

I think it showcases how the theories that have been studied by the likes of yourself are the ones that flow through to practice later on. If you look at when you were studying Explainable AI, versus when it became the main topic in the in the business world, these a clear line between those.

But also love the network type stuff. I think in the SME lending world, it's not a world I'd worked in before. But I touched on now with the podcast, but it has that added complication of networks, you can't just look at a business on its own because as you said, it's affected by its supply chain to understand contagion and links in that space, I'm sure will be a huge tool for for the growing number of trade finance companies out of there.

Galina, we've spoken about the conference as a link between professionals and academics. But it's obviously about more than that as well. I think Jonathan's also teased us a bit with '100 papers being delivered' so the scale of it is impressive and wide ranging, but what can people expect if they want to attend?

Prof Galina Andreeva 17:43

A broader philosophy could be formulated as working together in order to achieve better decisions. And as Jonathan mentioned earlier, these decisions should lead to fairer and more inclusive financial services and the world in general.

I think the topics of the past conferences and the forthcoming talks really reflect this focus on the final objective.

Yeah, of course they are are many purely technical talks about the new machine learning methods and new sources of data. And of course, you can't build credit scoring models without technology and without data. But there will be also papers focusing on fairness, my direction of research, financial vulnerability, affordability, over-indebtedness... climate Risk is becoming a huge topic recently.

We have a fantastic lineup of keynote speakers. And again, we try to maintain a good mix between academics, regulators and practitioners.

So we have four speakers coming from this three side. We have Catarina Souza, Head of Model Development and Review from Bank of England, Michaela Pagel from Columbia Business School in USA and two practitioners, Joseph Breeden, CEO Deep Future Analytic and Scott Zoldi, Chief Analytics Officer from FICO.

The conference will be packed with social and networking events. It's not just presentation, some talks, there will be the conference dinner, there will be coffee breaks there there will be the possibility to network online and in person.

And I would like to take this opportunity to thank our sponsors who support all different parts of these activities, experienced the headline sponsor Paragon, 4Most, Actico, FICO, TransUnion - without their generous support that conference wouldn't be such a rich and rewarding experience.

Jalal Khoylou 19:44

Speaking of sponsors and partners... at home online at the enviable www.credit-scoring.co.uk, is Paragon, a specialist credit risk management software provider to major banks and financial institutions across the UK, Europe and South Africa.

Brendan Le Grange 20:20

Now, Paragon are the gala dinner sponsor, but more than that, at that dinner, the Paragon Award will be presented to the best conference paper. So Jalal Khoylou, owner of Paragon Business Solutions, what is your history with the conference and why are you choosing to be involved again this year?

Jalal Khoylou 20:37

Mark Stirling and I started Paragon in 1991, to demystify the knowledge process of building credit models, which was safeguarded by select a few in industry. We soon realised that there was a large knowledge gap.

The Edinburgh University conference was the only forum at the time with the aim of bringing together the academic view and practioner banks, with this mix of academia, researchers, software and consultancies makes it a good forum for valuable discussion and collaboration and learning - which is closely aligned with our aims at Paragon.

We therefore decided to sponsor this conference in 1993, and created the Paragon Award for the best paper in the conference in 2001 for the paper best presented in the conference, which demonstrated advances in credit scoring methodology and reported a significant improvement and contribution to real life business problems.

Brendan Le Grange 21:33

Yeah, so 30 years as a sponsor of the event, but that also means, obviously, 30 years being an attendee. So when you think about it with that hat on, what is it that you're looking to incorporate into your business? How do you find the things you learn valuable for your day to day?

Jalal Khoylou 21:49

This year, we will be introducing our model governance tool Focus, Focus is all about making best practices easy and efficient, to meet regulation, and just as importantly, driving business value for portfolio and the models. There is an increasing volume of models that are produced by lenders. And therefore the regulators are looking to tighten up the rules in the ways these models been produced and applied.

We in this conference, we will be presenting our models and listening to the others to see what they are doing within this area. Plus our flagship product, Modeller, we've been adding machine learning algorithms, model explainability, reporting and linking with Python. This all wrapped in a strong proof governance, satisfy internal validation and audit teams and external regulators.

Last time, it was sitting alone on our desk listening to the conference. This year, we'll be meeting our old friends and new friends in the conference and have a get together.

Prof Galina Andreeva 22:53

In terms of what else the delegates can expect, traditionally, we had two pre conference workshops, one introduction to credit scoring for newcomers into the field. And the other one practical issues set along the theory traditionally delivered by David, this year, we added a new workshop on machine learning.

I would also like to mention the special issue of a good academic journal. And also for operational research. This is linked to the conference, the academics and the practitioners will be able to submit papers presented at the conference for this special issue. And this is a very important for academics who are constantly under pressure to publish.

Finally, I think I should mention and thank our programme committee. This year, we introduced another committee we call the programme committee, consisting of prominent academics from different countries and practitioners again. So by doing this, we are trying to expand into other countries to grow internationally.

Brendan Le Grange 24:08

Yeah, and I think one one thing I'd draw attention to as well is that you've got an open application process in terms of speaking at the event - so many events, yeah, the sponsor might get some speaking slots, other events, it might be open, but it's very few speaking slots available, and you have to go jump through all sorts of hoops.

But this is actually an opportunity that if you've got an abstract, people can put it forward for consideration and get their chance to speak about it. So it's a great opportunity to learn, but it's also a great opportunity to be able to come out to a group of your peers and to explain the work that you've been doing.

David Edelman 24:43

I think it's quite a quite a strength. I mean, the first two or perhaps three conferences, the weren't any parallel streams and then as we get more and more people wanting to talk then we started having parallel streams. We're now up to five, but what it does mean is whatever you want to talk about, if it is of reasonable quality, you might end up with only five people in the room, but there'll be five people who really want to hear your talk, you know, and you actually might get a lot of feedback from it rather than standing up in front of 100 people, of whom 80% of are actually not interested, and they'll be on their phones, or whatever.

Prof Jonathan Crook 25:14

Yeah, this is a really important point, if I might say so Brendan. There are many conferences where people present on many different topics - so an ONR conference and operational research conference, for example, might have credit scoring papers, two or three, but the thing about our conference is that it's very specific, and the audience have very knowledgeable, very specialised.

So if you give a talk here, you get really high quality feedback. It's very useful for the people that come.

Brendan Le Grange 25:40

Well, Jonathan, I'd like to stay with you actually, for a minute. I think that's a great point.

And you've got the ball rolling on this whole event, you've been there since day one, and I think sometimes the best way to describe an event may be to look back at some of its past highlights.

So what are some of the talk some of the presentations that maybe stand out? Are there any that stick in your mind as great examples of conference presentations?

Prof Jonathan Crook 26:04

Yeah, there are actually. Early, around 2002, Lyn Thomas gave a talk saying there's this Basel Accord, which people didn't know much about, this things coming your way and there's a load of research opportunities here. And my goodness, he was right, because as Christophe said, we've all published many papers on these things like loss given default, exposure at default, and so on. And much of that was, people were enthused when he heard Lynn talk.

There are also other papers, a classic one is Bob Stein from Wharton, who talked about geographic differences in credit risk, which became hugely influential and people building contagion into credit risk models.

There are a number of regulators that have given classic papers, where they were basically talking to the industry, they were using it as a forum to say, 'look, guys, this is what you need to do, this is a really important problem'.

That spawned a huge range of other pieces of work on survival models. In other words, not if someone defaults, but when. And Christophe has done some work on that we've done some work on that. There are many other highlights that I can think of, but there's just a few.

Brendan Le Grange 27:12

Yeah, and I think that you don't often get that chance to hear what the regulator's thinking until it's too late, when they're upset with you. So you to hear it in their own words, and you can meet them at the dinner and chat and understand what's happening.

More reason to really get together with your people, I suppose, and have a chance to go deep into topics, you don't often get that chance for looking forward.

Now, there's a few topics that we mentioned, but maybe if I open it up to the entire panel here, are there any themes and topics that you're going to be bringing to the audience, or that you've seen that people could be looking forward to for this year's event?

Prof Christophe Mues 27:48

From my perspective, I'm very interested in practitioners presenting work on how they've used deep learning or other advanced analytics techniques for their practical challenges.

Because they tend to focus on making it work, how to back test and validate these models, how to explain them, etc. So that that's definitely interesting.

But as others have said, as well, I'm really looking forward to see some more work on modelling the impact of climate change, and how to incorporate that in the credit risk models, because that's only going to get bigger and bigger as a theme.

David Edelman 28:20

I'm interested in two data aspects.

One is about if your alternative sources of data that's mainly so that we can actually help people like the unbanked. One thing I gave Lyn back in 1987 was some data, the academic institutions didn't have the data. And that was one of the very first things I did.

I first met Lyn back in 1982. And by '87 I was in banking, he needed some data, I had lots and lots of data, so wasn't a problem for me to give him 2,000 or 3,000 records - depersonalised, obviously, but you know, at least some real data. And that was a lot of data in those days. It was on a floppy.

Of course, we're now talking about synthetic data. So be interesting see, does that validly plug the gap?

Brendan Le Grange 29:01

What is synthetic data,

Prof Jonathan Crook 29:03

There's an issue with lenders allowing data out of the institution. They're or extremely careful that they don't give away any personal data, absolutely rigid about this.

That makes it difficult for academics to work with this data.

So there's a research line solve which is going on in Edinburgh where people are trying to build models, which is not the real data, but mimics the real data as closely as an algorithm can create it. Though, I should say, and David and Christophe and Galina alluded to this already, but lenders do allow very depersonalised data out for very specific reasons of research where the data is held under extremely secure conditions within universities by researchers.

David Edelman 29:50

The other hand, you've got the Lending Club data, which has about 2 million records.

Prof Jonathan Crook 29:54

Yeah, there are various sources of data, there's the Freddie Mac data on mortgages, which many Phd and many research papers have come from.

Prof Christophe Mues 30:02

But for some specific problems, you still need to link up with the financial institutions, co-design what problem you want to look at and then agree on what data you might be able to exchange with each other, right.

Prof Jonathan Crook 30:15

I think it's fair to say that all of us, Southampton and Edinburgh, would be delighted to receive anonymized data from lenders! I know Christophe's worked with that, we've worked with that as well.

The thing I'm really interested in, there's a series of papers looking at credit risk models and the economy. I mean, I've been working on this for some years now, but they're still very new ideas coming out new regulations from the Bank of England, for example, and making this even more interesting.

Another area that's coming up at the conference, that's emerging and very interesting, is that the use of transactional data, this is extremely difficult to get hold of and is where much of the work on synthetics is actually coming out.

Prof Galina Andreeva 30:56

It is also called as Open Banking, and Open Banking is seen as one of the main tools of improving financial inclusion.

Prof Christophe Mues 31:05

I think what is also interesting there is that you only get that data for a subset of the customers. So I've seen, there's going to be a couple of talks that look at if you've got different sources of data, and you only have this source available for this guy, this source for this guy, how do you integrate all of that? And how do you make that work?

Brendan Le Grange 31:24

And for me, one of the areas, just from my background, that I'd be interested in learning more about is this 'how do you deal with these patchy data sources', but I think the don't matter what your niche in the spaces, it's clear that there's going to be some topics worth studying, either because that's what you do or listening in because you're interested there.

But a lot more happening in credit risk these days isn't just how do you build a regression model...

Prof Jonathan Crook 31:50

As far as we can make out, this is the largest - and it has been for many years - credit risk conference, academic-practitioner credit risk conference in the world.

And we're still open for people to register for the conference. And if anybody would like to register, they can go to the Credit Research Centre website, and register there.

Brendan Le Grange 32:09

Yeah. And I'll put that in the show notes as well.

Prof Galina Andreeva 32:12

If people want to get a big discount, they should go to the conference website and go through the process before 5th of June.

They will be able to register afterwards, but at a higher price.

Brendan Le Grange 32:29

Perfect. So everyone will everyone listening will have a week at least to jump on that.

And yeah, I think as we've seen a number of topics to keep them interested but also a rare opportunity just to meet lots of people working on similar projects.

And it's a great city to gather and visit. So all the reasons in the world to find a way up there to Edinburgh, and to attend with the five of us.

So thank you all for joining me today for the show and for putting this together. I'm looking forward to seeing you in person later in the year.

And thank you all for listening.

Please do look for and follow the show on your favourite podcast platform and share the updates widely on LinkedIn where lending nerds are found in our largest concentration. Plus, send me a connection request while you're there.

This show is is written and recorded by myself Brendan le Grange in Brighton England and edited by Fina Charleson of FC Productions. Show music is by Iam_Wake, and you can find show notes and written transcripts at www.HowtoLendMoneytoStrangers.show

And I'll see you again next Thursday.