Clifford Rossi

Mortgage servicing rights are one of the most notoriously volatile assets in financial markets. The Federal Reserve's plan to loosen their capital treatment could foretell major problems in the future.

Climate models that purport to assess the risk of environmental damage faced by individual properties threaten to distort the market, despite having little demonstrable accuracy.

To strengthen the industry, large regional banks should be subjected to heightened supervision and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. should change how it assesses deposit insurance premiums.

The models that underpin the central bank's climate risk management exercise are deeply flawed and unsuited to the task at hand.

The historic election has presented an opportunity for a comprehensive overhaul of the housing finance system after eight years of gridlock.

Revelations from the last several weeks once again underscore the need for effective reputational risk management.

Heightened risk management standards and the "three lines of defense" are supposed to help banks ward off scandal, but they failed miserably.

Despite headwinds working against the mortgage insurance industry, this business could be the catalyst for bringing private capital back to the mortgage market.

Risk management is not limited to assessing potential successes and failures of everyday business. Strategic risk management is just as important.

Financial incentives leading firms to strengthen risk governance internally is better than regulators mandating risk management standards.

A mediocre solution as unappetizing as that may be, in the long run, it is preferable to no solution at all in the secondary mortgage market.

The proposed Small Lender Mutual cooperative would be expensive for small firms to capitalize, and its securities may get inferior pricing compared to those issued by large banks and nonbanks.

Sens. Tim Johnson and Mike Crapo run the risk of proposing a second-rate solution for the market to gain mass support for their new legislation.

For most of the banking industry, the ability to generate real-time views and assessments of risk across a company – right down to the transaction level – remains dangerously elusive.

Only three pages out of 40 in the OCC’s recent report cover interest rate risk. The discussion is toward the back. And the detail provided in quantifying exposures is scant.

Regulators should create a risk management quality rating that may be used in examinations and deposit insurance pricing. Banks should build capabilities that comprehensively assess the quality of their risk management processes tied to strategic business goals.

Lenders can take advantage of a concept the CFPB missed: compensating factors. Strong credit histories, substantial down payments, stable jobs and documented incomes can offset high debt-to-income ratios, for example.

Banking is increasingly a data-driven business. By creating a shared data and analytics utility, community banks could glean valuable insights on their business currently available only to large institutions.

The Office of Financial Research has made a number of improvements in its measurement of systemic risk but falls well short of providing a forward-looking assessment of emerging dangers.

A ban on portfolio hedging would perfectly illustrate the current practice of regulatory ‘populism’ that has pervaded financial regulatory reform since the crisis.