Living with CECL: The Modeling Dictionary

The new loan loss accounting rules for CECL and IFRS 9 require thousands of organizations to learn about modeling. Likewise, accountants and others in finance are now required to learn about statistical modeling concepts. This book is intended to define terms in a manner consistent with decades of academic literature on statistical modeling and hopefully reduce some of the noise and confusion just around definition of terms. It may also serve as a useful guide to analysts new to the field tasked with IFRS 9 compliance, the international loss accounting rules, and credit risk modeling in general. Each chapter of this book is a term that one might encounter when discussing creating lifetime loss forecasting models for CECL or IFRS 9. Not every term is a model, and some models listed are being mentioned only to explain why they are not likely to be used for loss forecasting. The CECL guidelines and subsequent FAQs have given examples of modeling techniques. Some people new to loss forecasting have assumed that those are all the available or applicable methods. This book is meant in part to dispel that misconception. The definitions and descriptions provided here are meant to provide an intuitive understanding across a range of modeling techniques. Mathematical derivations are kept to a minimum. The references listed will provide all the necessary details for an eager analyst.