Chief Analytics Officer
2013 - PRESENTCredit Risk Management Analytics- Responsible for the product development, strategic partnerships, and business intelligence for North Carolina-based vendor/consultancy providing underwriting, loan review, due diligence, ALLL, Stress-Testing, and ERM services to community banks.
- Designed, developed, managed, and sold a community bank enterprise risk management solution branded with Executive Risk Management Analytics (ERMA). The solution leveraged the existing risk content already encoded within a bank’s documentation (e.g., audits, exams, policies, etc.) and brought to bear charts of historical trends with dynamic forecasts from a variety of database-generated automated data feeds (macroeconomic, call report, and credit).
- Designed, developed, managed, and sold automated, interactive concentration analysis and portfolio management dashboards for community banks.
- Designed, developed and implemented a DFAST-lite solution which directed community bank loss stress testing results along with portfolio growth assumptions (from the bank for the baseline case and from macroeconomic regression analysis for other scenarios) through a bank’s income statement and balance sheet across the three Federal Reserve-provided Dodd-Frank Act Stress Test scenarios: baseline, adverse, and severely adverse.
- Layered an interactive, web-based dashboard on top of CRM Credit Leader underwriting software to surface key underwriting, servicing and loss data for macro-analysis intended to help CCO’s and CRO’s close the loop between the guidelines and policies under which they underwrite credits and the subsequent performance of those credits. Analysis included robust exception reporting by loan product, underwriting risk factor, vintage, loan officer and branch—even tracking subsequent charge off performance of “exception-range” quantitative underwriting criteria to provide black-and-white risk feedback relative to loan policy and pricing.
- Designed, developed, and managed a complete overhaul to the qualitative & environment module of CRM’s Allowance for Loan & Lease Losses (ALLL) product. The updated Q&E module utilized many of the same automated data feeds used in ERMA to provide a consistent and robust frame of reference under which management can subjectively consider the risks associated with each of the nine factors laid out by the 2006 Interagency Policy on the ALLL. Such analysis allows consideration of risk specific to each loan type, and the loan type’s sensitivity to various types of stress or reserving methodologies (e.g., CECL) were also presented in order to provide context and to help management gauge their basis-point formula reserve adjustments.
- Converted service-oriented, Excel-based ALLL calculation/process that required multiple steps and subject to model risk and audit-ability criticism to an atomic and automated database process. This overhaul improved the workflow—converting a multi-hour process to a button-click, and it also improved the calculation audibility (allowing drill through and drill down within a migration pattern to individual borrowers, accounts and dates). Moving the business logic to the database layer (vs. the presentation layer) solved the model risk issues. Ultimately, this database analysis enabled transitioning the ALLL process from a service to a product offering.
- Led the product enhancements on CRM’s underwriting software, the Credit Leader Suite. Led a team of developers, QA and credit specialists in setting priorities, establishing and monitoring timelines, documenting user stories and functional requirements, and executing on enhancement strategy. Notable functional enhancements include: (1) automated underwriting and decision-making to streamline and add consistency & accuracy to the underwriting process, (2) integration with Wolters-Kluwer’s Compliance One Lending API in order to embed our U/W within a market-leading LOS and to add consumer and small business auto-decision making capabilities to Wolters- Kluwer’s product, and (3) conversion of our software delivery model from a dedicated server on client networks to a cloud-based, SaaS, multi-tenancy model.
Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), GitHub, Subversion (SVN), Trello, Heroku, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Tableau, Microsoft SQL ServerCIO
2000 - PRESENTMetric Tracker- Co-founded an analytics consulting firm specializing in deploying interactive, reporting solutions to financial services, collections and call center companies.
- Led the development and successful deployment of an online reporting and report distribution system.
- Developed and successfully deployed interactive, dynamic portfolio and production reporting solutions against 15 different receivable hosts and 8 different dialer systems.
- Created 2 vendor-specific, plug-and-play OLAP-based interactive reporting solutions and deployed solution vertically.
Technologies: Adobe ColdFusion, Tableau, Crystal Reports, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft SQL ServerCIO
2009 - 2013Anchor Bank- Responsible for information analytics within a $5 billion Wisconsin bank with 54 branches. Provided oversight for bank reports, analytics and models with a focus on credit quality and risk management. Launched and led Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) program and system implementation. Managed the Business Intelligence department.
- Developed robust, inter-linked, and back-tested forecasting models around loan and REO losses (pool-based roll-rates and individualized migrations), provisioning, portfolio balances, interest yields and staffing. Intelligently allocated pool losses to individual accounts and cross-referenced against multiple external loss forecasts in order to produce account-relationship-portfolio-level side-by-side comparisons of loss perspectives (with actual-loss-to-date roll-forwards for normalized “remaining loss” comparisons). This analysis was critical for management’s understanding and communication of loss content to potential investors and regulators as part of the bank’s 2013 successful $175 million recapitalization effort.
- Led commercial life-cycle workshops to identify operational and risk management gaps within the commercial bank. Coordinated the assessment and executive-level communication of gaps. Developed and helped execute and report on remediation plans around broad information quality and leveraging issues related to loan collateral, covenants and appraisals. As part of these plans, directly developed automated 10-Q appraisal reporting, appraisal ordering work queues (for classifieds, maturities and REO), and covenant follow-up work queues with captured results for risk-weighting incorporation (of DSCR) and longitudinal analysis.
- Deployed a self-service commercial relationship manager reporting in Excel and web-based dashboards (with push distribution) to allow interactive access to each officer’s portfolio. Dashboards provided relationship-borrower-account-level perspectives for product (balances, penetration, map/geography), risk (maturities, delinquencies, risk ratings & accrual status, performance against internal and external loss forecasts and classified assets forecast, post close QC exceptions, covenants, appraisals, property tax delinquencies) and sales (pipeline, origination).
- Significantly enhanced the business intelligence team dynamics, retention and coverage through custom-developed 360° reviews, a SharePoint task tracking system, and an activity & resource matrix (with documentation and resource-coverage levels).
- Automated a month-end production of account and loan review files ranging from an interagency “ALERT” format for examiners to custom Excel files for internal or external loan reviews and data requests. Improved turn-around time, consistency and accuracy of such loan trial balance files and any report requests that leveraged these files.
- Iteratively developed relational and dimensional (i.e., OLAP-based) data warehouse leveraging Kimball methodology and ultimately incorporating source systems throughout the bank including host (Fiserv), HR (payments and employee history), GL, AP, SharePoint, electronic document management system, vendor data and manually maintained Excel files. Given the size of the bank/budget and resource skill sets, performed all development myself.
- Developed comprehensive “relationship” identification using dual-recursion across loan guarantors in order to, for the first time, properly surface and analyze large and complex bank relationships covering multiple loan products and borrowing entities. Automated the Excel-based loans (from one-to-multiple and one-on-one loans) to one-borrower and relationship reporting.
Technologies: SharePoint, Microsoft Excel, Tableau, Microsoft SQL ServerCIO
2008 - 2013Easy Tax Fix- Co-founded the company, developed a property-tax-specific AVM, and managed the successful cloud-based development and deployment of an online service which largely automates the property tax appeal service for the San Diego and New Jersey markets.
- The website used local comparable sale and assessor data to tell users for free whether their home was over-assessed and how much they may save in property taxes upon successful appeal. For a small fee, the service automatically filled out appeal paperwork for the user to submit to the proper authorities.
- Easy Tax Fix was featured on Fox Business and in the Wall Street Journal.
Technologies: ASP.NET, Microsoft SQL ServerCIO
2000 - 2008Clout Financial Services- Functioned in escalating roles of authority at this start-up credit card issuer to college students. Through Metric Tracker, the engagement started with model development and tracking actual company performance against the model, and it expanded to include extensive analytics for non-outsourced functions (i.e., collections and customer service) while helping to steward the company through a successful sale to Bank of America.
- Developed a vintage-based model which used actual MOB performance trending and historical averages to baseline forecasts of receivable growth, revenue yield, delinquencies, losses, etc. This model enabled the proactive identification of credit and performance deterioration for this largely subprime, thin-file pool and prompted a successful sale of the ~$250 multi-million portfolio to Bank of America just prior to the 2008 “Great Recession”.
- Led the successful development and deployment of an analytics-oriented customer service, collections and contact management system (i.e., GUI). This system replaced TSYS’s inefficient green screens with a web-based application and workflow engine that improved efficiency for agents, seamlessly integrated with additional data sources (e.g., acquisition, internal scoring database, IVR, dialer, & check-by-phone) to allow for more intuitive decision management and to facilitate cross sell or retention activities, and significantly enhanced data gathering capabilities for improved contact rates and agent productivity/portfolio reporting.
Technologies: ASP.NET, Microsoft Excel, Crystal Reports, Microsoft SQL Server
Jeff Berkson
Financial Modeling Developer in Raleigh, NC, United States
Member since June 18, 2020
Jeff has a unique combination of risk management, database, and BI skills. He's been the CIO of a regional bank where (through a data warehouse that he developed for them) he helped them re-capitalize. Broadly, he helps institutions leverage their data to make better decisions, and he does this from a business-first perspective, but with the technical wherewithal (read as an expert in SQL Server and Tableau) to quickly execute on this vision.
Jeff is now available for hire
Portfolio
- Credit Risk Management AnalyticsAmazon Web Services (AWS), GitHub, Subversion (SVN), Trello, Heroku...
- Metric TrackerAdobe ColdFusion, Tableau, Crystal Reports, Microsoft Excel...
- Anchor BankSharePoint, Microsoft Excel, Tableau, Microsoft SQL Server
Experience
- Microsoft Excel 20 years
- Risk Management 20 years
- Financial Modeling 20 years
- SQL 20 years
- OLAP 12 years
- Business Intelligence (BI) 12 years
- Tableau 10 years
Availability
Part-time
Preferred Environment
Microsoft Excel, Tableau, Microsoft SQL Server
The most amazing...
...project I've worked on is the translation of a cumbersome, multi-step, & Excel-based allowance for a loan loss model to an automated, atomic database process.
Employment
Experience
- Metric Tracker Website
Link to an analytics consulting firm which I founded in 2000.
Skills
Languages
SQL, T-SQL, MDX, RTools
Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Visio, Tableau, Microsoft Project, Microsoft Access, Crystal Reports, Google Analytics, Power Pivot, Sisense, Trello, Subversion (SVN), GitHub, Adobe ColdFusionParadigms
Business Intelligence (BI), OLAP, Scrum, Agile Software Development, Kimball MethodologyStorage
Microsoft SQL Server, Database Administration (DBA), PostgreSQL, MySQL, Relational Databases, Database Replication, Amazon S3 (AWS S3)Industry Expertise
Project ManagementOther
Financial Modeling, Risk Management, Loss Modeling, SAP BusinessObjects (BO), Analytics, Business Analysis, Forecasting, Commercial Banking, Credit Risk, Data Mining, DAXLibraries/APIs
Google AdWordsPlatforms
SharePoint, Heroku, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, Amazon EC2Frameworks
ASP.NET
Education
- Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy & Russian Literature1997 - 2000Duke University - Durham, NC (USA)
