Our lecturer Han Cui, is a Schulich Business School graduate with seven years of corporate banking credit adjudication experience. Han shared with the audience her career path that began with a two and a half-year international leadership rotation program at Scotia. In this program, she had the chance to work for multiple departments and eventually identified the function she truly has passion for corporate credit risk management.
She encourages young graduates to be fearless to try on different things when pursuing a career path. She advises individuals who are looking to enter corporate banking to start off with commercial banking that entails business on smaller scales.
After sharing her personal career experience, Han talked about key concepts in credit risk measurement (such as probability of default, recovery rate, etc.). She also illustrated risk management framework (including risk governance, risk appetite and risk management tools) taking Scotiabank as an example. Han asserted that the purpose of risk management is to identify and to mitigate the risk, and meanwhile helps the bank to generate revenue by lending to selective corporate clients that fall in the guidelines.
In addition, Han also led the audience through the credit adjudication workflow, illustrating the process from “acquiring client” to “credit application approval”. The relationship manager passes the request from clients and first-hand information to credit solution (execution team) who starts the credit application process by putting all the relevant information together into an application template, which includes purpose of the request, details on the request, deal structure analysis, financial analysis, risk rating recommendation,key risk and mitigants.
Credit adjudication is the 3rd stage, responsible of reassessing and evaluating the application as a whole, and forming the adjudication opinion.The credit application will then be approved at different levels of authority according to an adjudication metrics based on deal amount and risk ratings.