Credit Price Optimization

 

Dr. Robert Phillips

CTO, Nomis Solutions

 

September 18, 2006

 

 

 

Lenders such as banks have become highly sophisticated in calculating the default risk of possible loans.  Lenders have been less sophisticated in understanding how customers respond to the prices of their offerings.   This presentation describes an approach to optimizing prices for consumer credit in the case in which the seller has the option to set different prices to different customers depending on combinations of customer characteristic, product, and channel.   The optimal price for a loan is one that trades off customer response and product profitability to maximize expected total return for each customer.  Broadly speaking, this is a problem of optimal customized pricing.  However, credit has a number of unique characteristics including the existence of adverse selection that pose specific modeling and optimization challenges.  This presentation describes a methodology for optimizing consumer credit prices as well as two case studies:  auto lending and unsecured consumer lending.

 

 

 

Dr. Robert L. Phillips is founder and chief technology officer of Nomis Solutions, a company providing pricing and revenue optimization solutions to the financial services industry.  Prior to founding Nomis, Dr. Phillips served as chief technology officer of Manugistics (NASDAQ: MANU) and as founder and chief executive officer of Talus Solutions, a pricing and revenue optimization company.  Prior to that he was chief executive officer at Decision Focus Incorporated, a quantitative consulting firm.

 

Dr. Phillips is a recognized expert in pricing and revenue optimization.  He was the chief architect of the Talus Solutions pricing and revenue optimization software suite.  He pioneered the application of pricing and revenue optimization in many different industries including passenger airlines, cruise lines, rental cars, automotive, hotels, air cargo, trucking, container shipping, and financial services.  He has been a visiting professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Business and currently teaches a course in Pricing and Revenue Optimization at the Stanford University Business School.  He is author of the book, Pricing and Revenue Optimization which was published by the Stanford University Press in 2005. 

 

Dr. Phillips holds a Ph.D. in Engineering-Economic Systems from Stanford University and B.A. degrees in Economics and Mathematics from Washington State University.