Individual blog assignment #1

Sampling Software Screen

About a year ago I was involved with an IT company to try to develop a database and an automated sampling system for our loan reviews. Most financial institutions have custom made information systems. Most of our clients were no exception. Even though we required our clients to give us a complete data sheet in Excel, they all were slightly different. In addition, due the nature of the contracts, we require different levels of data. For example, Abc Bank has loans both in the US and in China, and thus they require that we review 30 % of Chinese loans and 60% of US loans. On the other hand, Xyz Bank only has loans on the US, but they require that we review 100% of all new loans over $250,000 and an additional 25% of the remaining portfolio. We would have to develop a separate Access database and sampling query for each bank. From the beginning we had multiple problems. The first problem was that the IT contractor would be located on South Carolina and with the exceptions of a few times were I had to travel there or they came to our offices all communication was over the phone or email. A second problem was that we had a dateline for each review and we had to develop each database before the date of the review and get a sample of the loans that need to be looked at. We tried to solve this issue by requesting the data from the banks 3 weeks in advance. Most banks would cooperate, but some would not. A third and the biggest problem was that the IT contractor could almost never make the sampling software work. Every time I ran it, it had a different problem. I would have to send them back to them to be fixed and it would come back a separate issue it didn’t have before. I think that this issue occurred because they always had different people working with us. In addition, I requested several times to add features to the software. The most important one was the ability to detect affiliated loans since we always have to review all of them together. They mentioned it couldn’t be done. I had to do that manually at every review. The other feature I wanted implemented was that the data updates weren’t so labor intensive. Some data had to be imported manually. It always took twice as much work for me to select a sample using the new software that doing it manually. After 18 months with no progress, the president of the company decided to call it off. As of today we still don’t have an automated sampling system (that works).