Job Description
RiskSpan
RiskSpan is a leading source of analytics, modeling, data and risk management solutions for the Consumer and Institutional Finance industries. We solve business problems for clients such as banks, mortgage-backed and asset-backed securities issuers, equity and fixed-income portfolio managers, servicers, and regulators that require our expertise in the market risk, credit risk, operational risk, and information technology domains.
- Title: Financial Business Analyst (Functional / Non-Technical)
- Division: Corporate Finance / Asset & Liability Management (ALM) & Capital Forecasting
- Project: Next-Gen Forecasting Optimization & Model Integration
Core Responsibilities
1. Requirement Gathering & Cross-Functional Coordination
- Bridge Tech Teams: Act as the primary liaison between quantitative financial engineering teams and business stakeholders (ALM desk).
- Coordinate Specifications: Document and coordinate updated model specifications and code fixes across multiple internal development groups.
- Document Methodologies: Draft comprehensive methodology documents outlining the business logic behind loan selection, parameter updates, and model changes.
2. Model Validation & Discrepancy Analysis
- Investigate Discrepancies: Analyze counterintuitive forecasting outputs by tracking data through the execution lifecycle.
- Analyze Financial Drivers: Identify variance drivers across mortgage-specific behaviors including prepayment, default behavior, buy-up/buy-down fees, and Loan Loss Reserves (LLR)
- Benchmark Forecasts: Compare and align disparate forecasting models to ensure consistency in critical risk metrics like cohort prices, duration dollars, and convexity values
3. Testing Coordination & UAT Governance
- Define Test Cases: Design functional test cases to validate the quality of sampled model outputs against massive full-population runs (13+ million loans).
- Manage Testing Artifacts: Author and organize testing documentation, UAT signs-offs, and compliance artifacts required for management approval.
- Validate Under Stress: Review model execution outputs following simulated rate shocks and volatility shocks to ensure ALM hedging stability.
4. Executive Reporting & Stakeholder Presentation
- Simplify Complex Data: Translate dense financial engineering data into clear, high-level presentations for senior leadership.
- Provide Status Updates: Deliver weekly status presentations to the ALM trading desk and upper management regarding hedging initiatives and model alignment.
Required Qualifications
- Education: Bachelor’s degree in Finance, Accounting, Economics, or a related business field.
- Experience: 3-5+ years acting as a Business Analyst within a mortgage banking, GSE (Freddie Mac/Fannie Mae), or fixed-income environment.
- Domain Expertise: Solid foundational understanding of Fixed Income, Asset-Liability Management (ALM), Mortgage-Backed Securities (MBS), and Capital Forecasting
- Functional Concepts: Familiarity with financial risk concepts such as Duration, Convexity, Multipath Stochastic runs, and Hedging
- Analytical Tools: Advanced proficiency with MS Excel for functional data auditing. Comfort navigating data-heavy environments (understanding what Python/SQL scripts do, even if you are not writing the code yourself).
