Economic Benefits of Crossrail
The two latest reports on Crossrail from Volterra and Colin Buchanan are now available on our website. We have been working in partnership to develop the economic analysis for the new East to West train link for London, changing the debate on how transportation schemes should be valued.
The first of the reports explores the costs of delaying a decision on Crossrail, in the form of increased construction costs, planning and transport plight, scheme redesign costs and lost benefits. We find that a mid-range estimate for the costs of a years delay is valued at £1.5 billion. The second report revisits the analysis of the Economic Benefits of Crossrail. We explore and develop key assumptions within the valuation and test the sensitivity of the results. The unpicking of conservative assumptions and the use of the latest research published by the DfT uplifts the valuation of Crossrail from £20bn to between £36bn and £67bn. Click here to find out more.
Said Hirsh visits Geneva giving a talk at an International Conference on Computational Management Science
Said Hirsh spoke at the 4th International Conference on Computational Management Science in Geneva. Said spoke about a unique approach to modelling the evolution of the riskiness of a bank’s corporate loan portfolio. This ‘management action’ model looks at the impact of the behaviour of a bank’s decision makers, in relation to granting and monitoring corporate loans, on the expected loss distributions of the corporate loan portfolio. The model is part of a project Volterra are carrying out for a major European bank. Click here for the presentation.
Ellie Cooper promoted to Associate Director
In April Ellie Cooper was promoted to Associate Director. Ellie has been with Volterra for almost four years. She has recently travelled to Los Angeles, Washington, Helsinki and Hamburg for work. Ellie is heavily involved with the economic analysis supporting Central Croydon Regeneration LLP’s proposal for arena-led development on the Gateway site in Croydon. She is also currently working on Economic Stress Testing within the Basel II area of work. Ellie is keen to develop the scope for using Social Networks analysis to inform business decision making.
Breakthroughs in understanding drivers of loss in unsecured lending
Many newspaper headlines have recently highlighted the rising levels of write-off by UK banks on unsecured lending. Understanding the drivers is tricky. There has been regulatory changes (such as IVAs), behavioural changes of customers and an overall relaxation in lending policies over the last ten years. Bank of England data show that raw write-off rates on unsecured lending are now higher than at the peak of the early 90s recession. Volterra’s Basel II team, led by Will Cook, has made great progress in understanding unsecured write-offs for several UK banks. They can use the results to help them make more accurate Basel capital calculations. Click here to find out more.
Volterra advises FSA on Government’s Basic Advice scheme
Basic Advice was introduced for the sale of the Government's suite of 'stakeholder' savings and investment products in April 2005. It is designed for consumers with little investment experience and who may find the cost of full advice prohibitive. Take up so far has been low. Volterra is advising the Financial Services Authority on the potential size of this market in future. We have used three quite different approaches, standard multinomial regression analysis, fuzzy clustering, and an agent-based model method. They all give very similar results! The FSA will publish the full report later in the summer.
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