Chief Data Officer · Canada
Dispatch 01 / Canada
Canadian mortgage arrears have stayed low while terms signed at the lowest rates renew at much higher ones. Boards should read payment strain and deposit behaviour instead, use what they learn to help borrowers and to provision honestly, and keep it out of pricing.
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Fairness testing of credit models usually compares outcomes between groups at the end of the pipeline. In a bilingual market the larger harm often sits upstream, in record matching that fails more often for French names and addresses, and it usually afflicts the old process as much as the new model.
Canada's consumer-driven banking framework will let customers direct their bank to share their data with accredited participants. Banks should treat the shared fields as a product with a published quality standard and a correction route, not as an interface built to satisfy a rule.
A leadership conviction
Most of the harm I have seen data do inside a bank came from shortcuts that were sensible when someone took them and that nobody revisited: an inferred language, a matching rule, a mapping table. I try to find those shortcuts before a customer does, to say in writing which customers a number leaves out, and to put the dissent beside the recommendation when a decision goes to the board.
Beyond the page
When Estelle brought the model census to my committee, she put the list of things she had decided were not models on the same page as the models. That list started the most useful discussion we had all year, and two items on it did not survive.
I am not seeking another executive role. I would consider one non-executive seat on a risk, audit or technology committee at an organisation outside lending that neither competes with nor borrows from Aubreuil, with our chief executive's consent. I accept a few advisory and speaking conversations each year, in English or in French.