Statistics in Retail Financial Services
About the group
The aims and objectives of the Statistical Methods in Retail Financial Services Research Group are:
- To apply statistical methods in the financial sector of industry; and
- To develop new statistical methodology arising from the novel challenges presented by these applications.
The group is part of the Quantitative Financial Risk Management Centre. This is a research consortium run from the Institute for Mathematical Sciences at Imperial College, the School of Management at the University of Southampton, and the Business School at the University of Edinburgh. It was established by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, with additional funding from the Economic and Social Research Council and the Institute of Actuaries. It carries out research and organises conferences and other meetings addressing issues in the retail financial services sector, in collaboration with banks, credit agencies, and other bodies. Some recent Imperial project descriptions are found on the QFRMC website.
It is very apparent that the level of sophistication of the methods and tools used by the banks to control their retail credit operations is increasing rapidly, and we aim to continue to be in the vanguard of this development.
We are always involved in discussions with banks and other financial bodies about possible collaborations or research sponsorships. Current projects are sponsored by Fair Isaac, Link Financial, and other bodies.
A list of recent publications from the group can be found here.
Members
The members of the group are:
| Internal | External |
|---|---|
| Professor David Hand | Dr Gordon Blunt (CACI) |
| Professor Martin Crowder | Dr Mark Kelly (Fair Isaac) |
| Dr Niall Adams | Mr Daniel Balabanoff |
| Dr N Heard | |
| Dr A Gandy | |
| Dr N Pavlidis | |
| Mr D Weston | |
| Dr A Brentnall | |
| Ms F Zhou | |
| Mr C Anagnostopoulos | |
| Mr G Ross | |
| Mr A Johar | |
| Mr A Sykulski |
News
The EPSRC-funded ThinkCrime project ran from 2005 - 2008, investigating fraud in the personal finance sector. An event to mark the end of the project was held in November 2007. Slides are available for download.This project involved collaborations with Capital One, Lloyds TSB, Abbey, and Alliance & Leicester.
A major EPSRC-supported project on quality of multivariate streaming data has commenced, with one of two PhD students already in post, two post docs about to begin work, and a second PhD student to join the project later.
The EPSRC/ESRC-funded Quantitative Financial Risk Management Centre, focusing on Risk Management in the Personal Financial Services Sector has been established. This is a consortium project, with Imperial as the hub and with Southampton and Edinburgh universities as partners.
Prof Hand has been appointed a Fellow of the Wharton Financial Institutions Center for 2005-6.
The EPSRC-funded project A statistical approach to default correlation, jointly held by Profs Davis, Hand, and Crowder came to a successful conclusion in 2005. The EPSRC-funded project Modern statistical approaches to increment/decrement models, jointly held by Prof Hand and Dr Holmes (Oxford) has made good progress, and has several papers in draft. Fair Isaac supported several graduate students on short projects.
