Customer Reviews

Credit Card Risk Management

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I read with some confusion a recent review of this book. In that particular review, the reader seemed disappointed that upon completing 'CCRM' he was not transported to higher plain of knowledge.

Having been in the field of Credit Risk Management for nearly a decade, I would have been offended had the author promised an explanation of all its intricacies in 318 pages. I found 'CCRM' to be an excellent work - intended to be 'a reference guide and training tool' for a rather understated topic. I purchased 30 copies for use in (re)training of new hires, interns, and management trainees.

In every instance, these individuals gained an understanding of what was involved in this field of work. Not because this book answered all of their questions, but rather because it didn't. The readers are forced to look outside of its covers... to analyze.

I bought this book after hiring too many people who misrepresented their risk analysis skills and I had to figure out how to get them properly trained. This book did help educate some of those "experts" but I could really use the help of an expanded version.

Overall, I found the book is as described by the author and the publisher.

The book is written in such a way as to make you think about managing credit risk rather than as a "how to" manual. Too many analysts needed their hand held and spent their time looking for the answer rather than trying to solve the problem. Analyzing the problem requires an understanding of all the risk components and figuring out how to improve upon them - regulations, credit policy, pre-approval processes, credit scoring, fraud, production reports, data mining, etc.

What would really help is to see the book updated to expand on each of the topics (incorporate some how-to) and include some analytical programming examples, such as SAS. They could fix the grammatical errors too, not that I really care about that though (as you can tell from my review).

Before we spent the money on purchasing books I had to research this author and his book through our contacts at the OCC, FDIC, and Federal Reserve. My manager is very "frugal." These agencies also provided me with contacts at financial institutions that know about the author's work. The feedback was really interesting. They all credited the author, in one way or another, as being a big influence on pioneering the current technologies and analytical methods used in credit risk management. One person said, "Rich is tough and tenacious but his loan portfolio's were of the highest quality, so it was well worth the battle."

After actually buying copies of the book, I found it to be insightful about the myriad of issues affecting credit risk management. The book isn't written for those with 6th grade reading level skills, so that could be a problem for some people. I agree with one other posting - it would have been great to get SAS programming code for the scorecard monitoring, performance reporting and the analysis as a part of this book.

Based on what I've learned, there really is no silver bullet to solving the mounting losses in today's economic environment. This book helped me to look more broadly at the credit cycle at controlling exposure along the continuum. Using the book for its methodology and as backup to know my judgment is right, I'm making a difference in improving our loan quality.

If you have never been in credit card business, and you have to start career there, the orientation of this book fits well. Of course, if you are already in the industry for at least 2 years, there is little in the book that can interest you much.

But, at least the copy I bought, is loaded with grammar errors. Many sentences are not properly ended without a period. I felt somehow difficult to believe that this text can be used for group training.