Michael Derstine @ Wells Fargo | Data Science Hangout

We were recently joined by Michael Derstine, Vice President at Wells Fargo & Company to chat about an opinionated approach to modeling and analytics in mortgage banking.

Speaker bio: Michael Derstine leads a team of analysts dedicated to the management of an asset class called Mortgage Servicing Rights (MSR). He is approaching his tenth year in mortgage finance, and has held many roles. He started as a junior analyst, compiling webs of spreadsheet reports in the early hours of the morning before the Traders started their day. Like many in this community, he was driven to make processes better (and make life easier).

How do you advocate for a better way?

04:05 - Michael shared his story about waking up before 5 am 😴 as a junior financial analyst, pulling together dozens of spreadsheets with hundreds of tabs, other people’s models and recycled work Each day, he’d make sure nothing was wrong before traders started acting on these models.

He was motivated to not only make his life easier, but make processes better and remove the operational risk. 💰

The spreadsheet process has since moved to data science. It’s completely automated. No junior analyst has to get up at 4:30 am. Those roles still exist but now they’re encouraging them to use languages like R and Python.

Michael shared, “I’m very proud of that, but it was a lot of work technically and maybe even more work politically to get that through”

If you’re changing the status quo, build a challenger processes by:

1. Building something in parallel
2. Running it side by side and obliterating the old competition to show how much better it is
3. Telling the story to your bosses

________________________

Follow Us Here:

Thanks for hanging out with us! 💛