Can data science capture key insights in news articles?

Itua Etiobhio, Riyad Khan and Steve Blaxland

The volume of information available to supervisors from public sources has grown enormously over the past few years, including unstructured text data from traditional news outlets, news aggregators, and social media. This presents an opportunity to leverage the power of data science techniques to gain valuable insights. By utilising sophisticated analytical tools, can supervisors identify hidden patterns, detect emerging events and gauge public sentiment to better understand risks to the safety and soundness of banks and insurance firms? This article explores how data science could support central bank supervisors to discover significant events, capture public trends and ultimately enable more effective supervision.

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Quantifying culture and its implications for bank riskiness

Joel Suss, David Bholat, Alex Gillespie and Tom Reader

‘Bad cultures’ at banks are often blamed for scandals and crises, from the global financial crisis to the mis-selling of payment protection insurance (PPI) in the UK. Yet surprisingly little research has tested this claim. This is because quantifying culture is difficult to do. Our working paper gives it a go. Leveraging unique access to data available to regulators, we diagnose the cultural health of the UK banking sector. We find that banks with organisational cultures two standard deviations below the sector average are associated with a 50% increased risk of failure.

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Planes, boats and automobiles: a discussion of machine learning with telematics data

Ali Soliman

Data plays a central role in all technical aspects of insurance and actuarial work. However, utilisation is often still confined to aggregate premium and claims data. Not so in the case of telematics. Say the phrase ‘black box’ and most people will think of flight recorders fitted to aircraft. But Motor insurers also use the millions of data points generated by black boxes, fitted to more than a million cars in the UK, to price risks. What’s more Marine insurers are getting in on the act. In this post we take an actuarial vantage to explore the use of telematics data and consider whether insurers could be using this ‘gold mine’ of information even more widely.

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