BMO Bank of Montreal Adopts Nomis Solutions’ Pricing Optimization Across Multiple Product Areas


San Bruno, CA (PRWEB) November 10, 2008

Nomis Solutions, the leading provider of best-in-class Pricing and Profitability Management for financial services companies, today announced that BMO Bank of Montreal (NYSE: BMO) has selected the Nomis Price Optimizer. BMO will deploy Nomis Solutions’ award-winning pricing optimization solution for originations and retention across multiple product areas with an initial focus on personal and indirect lending. Scheduled to deploy its first set of optimized rates early in 2009, BMO is anticipating greater agility in the rapidly changing market.

By deploying the Nomis Price Optimizer across multiple product areas, BMO will be leveraging a best-in-class pricing and profitability management approach that is based on a quantifiable understanding of the impact of pricing on customer response, product performance, and risk. BMO will then have a more consistent, repeatable and efficient pricing process that allows them to make changes more dynamically and with a higher level of confidence.

“With our work in the Canadian market over the past two years, we’ve learned a lot about customer response to offers and pricing and have demonstrated our ability to materially impact financial performance for our customers,” said Nomis Solutions’ Chairman and CEO,

Dennis Stradford. “We look forward helping BMO adopt a more advanced and dynamic approach to pricing strategically across its retail banking businesses.”

The award-winning Nomis Price Optimizer is designed for executives responsible for pricing loan and deposit products who want to use pricing strategically to drive financial performance at the national, regional, and local levels. This solution is the backbone of the Pricing and Profitability Management suite and delivers a clear understanding of customer response and how price impacts performance. By leveraging this information, the pricing team can quickly pinpoint which segments are under-priced or over-priced and better tailor pricing decisions to meet performance targets. Nomis Price Optimizer also helps build a more attractive portfolio mix to meet the “originations to order” requirements of the securitizations market. Currently deployed at more than 12 banks and finance companies worldwide, Nomis Price Optimizer optimizes more than $ 5 Billion in consumer lending each month.

About Nomis Solutions

Nomis Solutions enables best-in-class Pricing and Profitability Management for financial services companies. Through a combination of advanced analytics, innovative technology, and tailored business processes, the Pricing and Profitability ManagementTM Suite delivers quick time-to-benefit, and improves financial and operational performance throughout the customer acquisition and portfolio management processes.

The Pricing and Profitability ManagementTM Suite of business solutions includes the award-winning Nomis Price OptimizerTM, the Nomis Offer OptimizerTM, the Customer Portfolio OptimizerTM, and the Nomis NavigatorTM. These solutions are designed to meet the specific requirements of auto finance, home equity lending, personal lending, mortgage, and deposits executives. Select customers include Abbey, AmeriCredit, Chrysler Financial, HBOS plc, and Royal Bank of Canada. Headquartered in San Bruno, CA, Nomis Solutions also has offices in London, United Kingdom. Visit http://www.nomissolutions.com or contact us at 650-588-9800.

Nomis Solutions, the Nomis Price Optimizer, Nomis Offer Optimizer, the Customer Portfolio Optimizer and the Nomis Pricing and Profitability Management Suite are trademarks or registered trademarks of Nomis Solutions, in the United States and in other countries. Other product and company names herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

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Multiple Control Failures To Blame For The Current Credit Crisis

New York, NY (PRWEB) February 25, 2009

The public has been quick to place sole responsibility for the crisis on the shoulders of bankers, and their perceived excesses. However in any crisis, be it a Depression, Fraud or Catastrophe such as the Three Mile Island Nuclear incident, it is not any one failure point, or person, that leads to a disaster but a confluence of more minor interlinked breakdowns.

A misplaced reliance and faith in mechanical risk models, possessing known flaws and weaknesses, were exploited throughout the mortgage chain.

Loan originators were actively encouraged to push high commission, high risk products, such as Adjustable Rate Mortgages, whilst at the same time over-inflating borrowers assets and under-stating borrowers expenses in order to generate mortgage flow for Wall Street. The controls in place designed to mitigate these abuses, such as obtaining substantiating documentation and 3rd party credit checks were often ignored, omitted or seldom verified.

Bankers packaged, split and combined these mortgages into Bonds backed by them. These bonds were subsequently securitized into Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDO) and then turned into ever more complex and esoteric products, such as CDO^2. These products were impossible to price given their complexity, lack of historic default & price performance information, thereby making management of the associated risks unattainable.

Bankers let the task of independently pricing and rating these securities prior to issuance with Rating Agencies leading to a conflict of interest as Rating agencies were paid for these ratings by the bond issuers. In addition to this moral hazard, Rating Agencies used overly simplistic risk and pricing models that did not take into account systemic risks, risks that the underlying assumptions used in their valuations would be moot due to “extraordinary” market conditions.

To protect themselves from unexpected losses on CDOs, sophisticated investors relied upon the purchase of a type of insurance contract, the Credit Default Swap which shared the same fundamental flaws in pricing and risk as the CDOs. Whilst the economic benefit of a CDS is sound in principle, the vast majority of these CDS were written and traded solely as a speculative play. As defaults increased to levels way beyond those used in the initial modeling of price and risk the perceived likelihood that the originating issuers of being burdened with “insurance” payouts that they will be unable to pay further added to market turmoil and systemic risk.

Industry regulators, bodies who’s task is to protect investors by maintaining the fairness of Capital Markets, must also bear a portion of the blame for the current crisis. Regulators were under staffed and over lobbied by financial institutions eager to remove rules designed to reduce the level of risk they could take on. In addition regulatory staff working at the coal face were seldom experienced and educated in the fields of risk management and were primarily concerned that the banks were following the rules set by the regulators, rules that possessed loopholes that institutions readily exploited.

In the end the credit crisis resulted from failures of many interrelated controls. Moral hazard over the way in which compensation was awarded, controls that were actively avoided, known flaws in risk models which were overlooked and the gatekeepers of the financial market were under funded and over lobbied. Such far ranging failures throughout the entire mortgage process demand a complete rethink on how financial products and markets are modeled, monitored and controlled.

About Crest Rider

Crest Rider Inc is a Management Consulting firm specializing in developing Risk & Governance solutions in the fields of Capital Markets, Investment Banking and Insurance

For more information, visit http://www.crestrider.com or contact Julian Fisher at 212 721 1580

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