Liz Savage
Analytics Consultant
Liz is a credit risk professional with over 10 years’ experience in both the UK and Australia. She has exceptional data management and analytical skills and a passion for finding analytical solutions to complex problems. This is complemented with a deep understanding of application and behavioural credit scoring, and skills in optimising decision strategies and supporting operational processes. Liz has a strong record of delivering substantial business benefit at both large and small organisation levels.
Liz started her career in the retail credit risk team at a UK high street bank, where she gained experience of all stages of the scorecard modelling process, from liaising with stakeholders to establish requirements, presenting the results and making recommendations, and following through with implementation and establishing monitoring reports.
She later joined Vanquis Bank; a start-up that dealt exclusively in credit cards. Here, she worked within a small team to create a viable business; the bank moved from pilot stage to full business activity after 18 months of issuing cards. Working for a start-up company allowed her to develop a wider understanding of the business as a whole, and of how integral credit risk is to achieving sustainable business results. In this role, she developed the initial decisioning strategy though a test-and-learn approach. This included rapid deployment of test strategies covering credit policy, application scorecards and the associated cut-offs. Liz also played a crucial role in ensuring successful implementation and established both the scorecard monitoring and decision strategy reporting processes. She worked with the acquisitions and fraud teams to improve operational efficiencies by developing and testing automated procedures, and developed off-line processes to implement scorecards prior to online solutions.
Liz then joined the Mortgage Capital Division of Lehman Brothers to lead a team of analysts responsible for reporting on the mortgage portfolio, including securitised asset pools. In this role, she redesigned data warehouse strategy and reporting processes, including the introduction of new data management and manipulation techniques, to fully automate production of reports. She also designed a process to facilitate risk-driver identification and analysis to support recommendations on future product assignment.
Liz was asked to return to Vanquis Bank to lead a small team to redevelop the behavioural scorecards and to optimise the credit line increase strategy. The impact was a significant reduction in bad debt arising from credit line increases. She later moved to the value management team, where she was the dedicated credit risk representative of the business development team, undertaking due diligence from a credit risk perspective on various portfolios, whilst remaining responsible for the credit line strategy.
Liz is an experienced SAS user, and excels in creating automated procedures for operational efficiency, including interactive programming between SAS and Visual Basic to automate the scorecard development and validation process. She enjoys programming, and strives for continuous improvement, including teaching herself to program in Python, and is now learning to program in R.
Liz holds an Honours Degree of Bachelor Science in Mathematics, Statistics and Operational Research from University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology in the UK.
