You're listening to leaders in lending from Upstart, a podcast dedicated to helping consumer lenders grow their programs and improve their product offerings.
Each week, hear decision makers in the finance industry offer insights into the future of the lending industry. Best practices around digital transformation. And more, let's get into the show.
每周,听听金融业的决策者们对借贷行业未来的见解。最佳数字化转型实践等等,让我们开始节目吧。
Welcome to Leaders in Lending. I'm your host, Jeff Keltner. This week's episode features my conversation with Paul Gooe, the co-founder and the head of product and data at Upstart.
Actually, this is our second conversation with Paul. And his first episode is actually still our most listened to episode of all time. So we're excited to bring Paul back.
It was a really interesting conversation delving into some recent innovations. Upstart is made around measuring the impact of macroeconomic conditions on loan performance.
Really separating out individual performance of loans from the macroeconomies impact on those in a very quantifiable way, which I thought was a fascinating topic. It's a really interesting area of research.
So we kind of dive into how it works, why, how that can be utilized and what Upstart is working on in the future towards us.
所以我们会深入探讨它如何运作,为什么,如何利用以及Upstart未来对我们的发展所做的工作。
It's a really interesting topic, one, I obviously highly relevant in the current environment. And so I appreciated having a chance to dive deep with it with Paul.
这个话题非常有意思,显然在当前的环境下非常相关。因此,我很感激有机会跟保罗一起深入探讨它。
I will say there's one correction to make up front, which is that Paul mentions what he called the Upstart macro forecast or a UMF. And the correct term is Upstart macro factor, still UMF. So just a quick correction.
And without further ado, please enjoy this conversation with Paul Gooe.
不多说了,请享受这次与保罗·古的交谈。
Paul, welcome back to the podcast. Thanks for joining us again.
保罗,欢迎回到播客节目。感谢您再次加入我们。
Oh, I'm happy to be back. It's grown quite a bit since I was last here.
哦,我很高兴回来了。自从我上次来这里以后,它已经变化了很多。
It is. It is one of the most popular episodes, the original that we've ever had. So apparently already it's like technical discussions. We talked about AI and lending and a more technical way last time. So we're going to try and give them a little bit more technical stuff.
Well, the topic of discussion today that I really wanted to dive into is the topic of what we call the Upstart macro index or UMF. Because that's been, I know we've talked about it a bunch and earnings.
We talked about it publicly. We've talked about it with our partners. But we haven't disclosed a lot about it or gone in depth. And so I know some people have gotten one-on-one introductions or explanations. But I would have spent the day kind of diving into it.
So maybe the best way to just start is like, what is UMI?
也许最好的方法就是先从什么是UMI开始了解吧?
Yeah. UMI stands for Upstart macro index. And before I describe what it is, I might take a step back and just describe how we got here and why we started working on this thing that became known as the UMI.
If you take a step back and look at where we were in, call it, mid-2021. At that time, very loosely speaking, almost everybody was doing a good job of repaying their looks. Obviously not everybody. There were always defaults. But repayment rates were extremely high compared to historical norms.
And it had looked like at the time everybody was a genius in lending. You could have lent to pretty much any type of consumer and probably you are outperforming your expectations in terms of repayment rates and therefore rates of return on debt capital deployed.
Then you fast forward another year to mid-2022 and the story had flipped. Instead of every type of borrower outperforming, now you had almost every type of borrower underperforming.
And the change from mid-2021 to mid-2022 was dramatic. And you could see that in a variety of metrics. But it wasn't totally clear how you would precisely tease that out and quantify what had happened in the quote unquote macro environment from mid-21 to mid-22.
We started to have conversations with a lot of our lending partners of the forum. Well, what's going on? All I see is that delinquency rates have gone through the roof. I don't know if it's because delph start decided that has delph start to model has gone bad. Delph start to sort of open the floodgates to low-quality borrowers. What servicing degraded. What in the world is going on?
And when you see a very dramatic change 2X3X, they weren't talking large multiple in a short period of time. People naturally get worried and they want to know. And of course, we wanted to know too.
And we had a pretty good sense from the indirect metrics that we had, of course, kept our eye on. But it wasn't precise in the way that we would like to have had it. And so we said, well, we really want a precise quantitative way to tease apart what we call the macro and the micro effects of underwriting.
And more precisely what I mean by that is if you think about what an underwriting model does, the one hand it has to separate risk. Meaning it has to say this particular applicant is more likely to default than this other one and they're more likely to default by 2X.
But another thing it has to do is it has to figure out the absolute levels of default risk. So that first baseline borrower, what does a nearly risk free borrower look like? What does a super risky borrower look like? And what is the average population default rate going to look like?
And the reason that those are such separate problems is that for that second problem, you really have, in some sense, very limited amounts of historical data to train on in the way that you would like to train an ML model. Whereas for the first problem, the risk separation problem, you have an enormous amount of data that you could look at basically every single default that's ever happened is mostly a story of relative default.
It tells you that within a given period of time, how likely was a particular borrower or a historic default compared to some other borrower characteristic? Whereas to look at the average level of default in say a year, well, you only have so many years on record and you certainly don't have the thousands or millions of data points that you would like to have.
And human history barely goes back that far. And certainly we weren't recording our loan repayments going back to those days. So that makes it very challenging. And so we sort of have just like a handful of meaningfully different periods, recessions and non recessions, you can think of it as like maybe like 20 data points in recorded history. And 20 is just not enough for any kind of serious machine learning training problem.
And so we separated this sort of micro question and this macro question. And we said, okay, how can we just precisely measure the macro component and know whether a period of time is seeing a increase or decrease and of how much compared to past periods in its average level of default across the population?
So that's what we wanted to know. And about 18 months ago, we started pouring a lot of our research science attention to this problem. And the end result is something that today we call the UMI, the upstart macro index.
Yeah, the upstart macro index. Essentially, it takes a, it aims to tell you if you had constant borrowers. If you were just constantly making loans to the exact same group of people across different periods of time, what would the delta in their delinquency rates be in different days, weeks, months, years, whatever timeframe you want to compare?
And the way it does this is by making use of what we call a reference model. Because of course, you can't actually find exactly identical borrowers every single year to make loans to. And no matter how you control it with one variable, two variable, you might say, well, let's just look at borrowers who are 680 to 720 on the FICO scale.
That would be a very simplified way to do this. But of course, there are a million other things to know about these borrowers other than their FICO score. And so the way to do that in a more holistic and continuous way is with what we call a reference model.
So you say, what if we under wrote all of these loans with exactly the same model? Because of course, in reality, every loan you have on your books is underwritten with probably a different model at a different period of time. But if you instead under wrote them with exactly the same model and made predictions for every single month that you've subsequently observed, how do the actual delinquency rates and default rates compare to what a constant reference model would have predicted?
And what that tells you, the reference model is doing the work of controlling for the consumer and they what you can observe is, of course, the actual loss rates in real calendar months compared to what the model would have predicted on this sort of abstracted hypothetically constant kind of calendar time period.
And so the deltas in those observations compared to a sort of now controlled expectation of default or delinquency is going to tell you how much more or less risky 2022 was compared to 2021 compared to 2019 compared to 2017. And so that's what we've developed. We call it the absurd macro index and it does a really good job for us of both explaining how a sort of past delinquency patterns have played out and why they've played out that way.
And also actually in being able to make forward looking statements of the forum, well, if the macro environment gets 50% worse, then this is what will happen to your loss rates and being able to make statements of that form, of course, then allows us to make useful statements about how we should be building in buffer and conservatism to the underwriting for any given lending partner, how aggressive or conservative their parameters are set in how much lending they want to do.
So a really useful both backwards looking and forwards looking. So I got a number of questions to dive off of this one of the things you said. But first I kind of want to be clear, when you produce the index, it's a singular number for any given month as I understand it. How should someone look at the number and say, what does this tell me if it's a 1.0, a 2.0, a 0.5? Like what's the actual index and how do I think about reading it? And then I want to dive in a bunch of things that you said about this.
Yeah. So the index is condensed down to a single number, as you just said. And that single number can be applied to any length of time. So usually we talk about it in one month periods because most of our loans have one month repayment period. So it makes a lot of sense to look at it that way. But you could look at them in days, weeks, years, quarters, however you like. But for a period of time, you're going to have a number that number is going to range all of the between 0 and 3 generally. Though, of course, there's no theoretical upper limit to how high the UMI could go.
But what we've normalized the numbers to mean is that as a 1.0, generally is meant to correspond to a, what we think of as a sort of historically normal time, or at least historically normal time in our reported history. What you can generally think of as being the sort of five years before COVID. And those five years, there was a relatively sort of a stable macro environment. We do not see large changes, you know, taking that reference model approach. If you're just underwritten all the loans using the same model, you would basically see the same sort of results across the different calendar years.
Whereas, whereas after that, of course, once you get into the COVID world, you see both large positive and negative shocks to that, which is exactly what this methodology is hoping to tell us about. Yeah, imagine that the COVID period, particularly the very serious economic impact than the rapid input of stimulus, and then the rapid withdrawal of stimulus was like changing of macro conditions on steroids, or at least at fast forward speed in terms of a normal cycle, which I think is kind of what was some of the impetus for this is that kind of rapidity of change. What we usually think of is maybe not a super slow, but not as rapid of a changing environment as we experience over the last 24 months.
Yeah, totally. I mean, it was almost a perfect couple of years to showcase just the difficulty of the macro prediction problem, which we've always felt was not really a good prediction problem in the sense that these, you have so few of these events as we talked about, and each shock looks really different. So trying to predict them based on past shocks is what's kind of silly. And I mean, April 2020 was probably the most extreme example of this, where April 2020 hits. And of course, we have built over the years plenty of what you'd call macro prediction models that look at things like unemployment rates and various sort of macro indicators that unemployment generally has in past shocks been the single biggest driver.
But what happened in April 2020, while unemployment rates went through the roof, I sort of never before seeing rapid rise in unemployment. And yet what happened to low-repayment, well, it turns out that within a very short time low-repayment did not only do not get worse, it became the best period of low-repayment probably ever in all of human history. And it was because, of course, that the government responded very forcefully to the increased unemployment pandemic and did a lot of stimulus in various ways. And people had a lot of extra cash to make their loan payments and not as many places spend it because they were locked up at home.
And so you got exactly the opposite effect of what sort of historical precedent what I've told you. And then if you look to 2022, you get almost the mirror image of that where you have extremely low unemployment, basically pushing records in terms of how low unemployment gets. And yet you have this rapid rise in delinquency rates and it's for exactly the same reason. The stimulus ends. People still had jobs, but it turned out that printing money and giving it to people had a bigger impact on whether they would repay their loans and seeing if they were working hard on it.
So I want to ask about how traditional lender, I mean, this is certainly the topic of how is the macroeconomy playing into loan performance? Every time I talk to lenders are looking at inflation rates and interest rates and unemployment rates and trying to understand what that's going to mean or is doing to a given portfolio. So how do you think traditional lenders have looked at the kind of problem you're trying to model or at least the data point of like what is the macro environment doing to the loss rates in a pool? And what are the weaknesses in the way it's traditionally been done that you were trying to solve for when you thought about building out the UMI methodology?
Yeah, so I think there's spectrum of approaches, but they share a couple things in common.
嗯,我认为有不同的方法,但它们有几个共同点。
The first is that because many traditional lenders don't change their underlying models very much or they have very simple ones that have a very limited number of variables, they can kind of make an assumption.
And it doesn't seem as crazy as it does in our world though, we'll get to why it still suffers from some of the same challenges, but it doesn't seem as crazy to make the assumption that hey, we are underwriting with a constant model and so the borrowers that we produce across different years should roughly be the same and if they're roughly the same, then I can understand where the macro is just by looking at the average default rate in my own portfolio.
And this is sort of okay. It's sort of okay because if you actually don't change your model in any way, then actually you do have a fairly constant model.
这有点可以接受。因为如果实际上您不以任何方式改变您的模型,那么您确实拥有一个相当不变的模型。
But of course it also assumes that your borrower mixes on changing across time that your pricing approaches have not changed across time and actually hasn't changed in any way across time and of course we know that even if you just were using the FICO score done, and of course the FICO score distribution is changing across time and the inputs to it are getting changed by how medical bankruptcies are handled and different things like this.
So there are actually a bunch of these changes happening under the hood and maybe they're not that extreme, but put together they're probably each 10-20% type effect.
其实在背后会有许多这些变化,也许它们并不是那么极端,但加在一起,它们可能会产生10-20%的影响。
And soon you could be in this world where you might be seeing default rates that are 50% higher and now you have to ascribe that to macro.
很快你可能会进入这样的世界,其中违约率可能会高出50%,现在你必须将其归因于宏观经济因素。
When in reality it might just be that your borrower makes change 20% and your underwriting model will change 20% and there you are with the 50%.
So that's pretty inherently challenging to measure macro in.
所以,这对于衡量宏观因素来说是非常困难的。
And then I think on the sort of response side to macro, I think it's also when you don't have a precise factor that's able to separate what your underwriting model is doing and what is happening in the macro.
There's always this temptation to say, well, we can fix the problem just by changing the underwriting model.
我们总是忍不住想说,我们只需要改变承保模式就可以解决问题。
So if we only focus on higher FICO borrowers or higher income borrowers then we don't have to worry about the effects of a recession or the effects of the macro shock.
And I think that is an approach that really can get you into trouble where you look at a lot of past recession something like 2008 and you look at what happened to credit card delinquency rates in 2008 or more insurances in 2008 and what you see is actually that the largest multiple increases to delinquency and default rates were in high FICO buckets.
And maybe it's a little counterintuitive but then if you think about what was happening in 2008 of course one thing is that the biggest stress were on people who were buying large homes and had big, big mortgages and of course that's going to be a primer consumer.
And another thing is that of course it matters quite a lot, the kind of shock in the economy and whether that's something that's going to impact more prime people or less prime people.
But some of the less prime people actually in some sense are like always in a recession. They're kind of living paycheck to paycheck in a way that means their lost rates are normally much higher but it's also harder for them to get so much higher.
Whereas when you have someone who goes from being comfortably putting money in the bank every month to suddenly lose their job, it's a fairly tremendous change in their ability to pay things and of course a debt obligation is much larger.
There's less ability to easily make up for it just by going to backup sources of cash. There's these different effects that play out.
仅仅通过去备用的现金来源来轻松弥补它的能力变少了。有这些不同的影响会产生作用。
It's very hard, I think, nearly impossible to solve for macro problems by changing the borrower level characteristics that you underwrite to because there are no set of characteristics that are inherently recession proof or macro shock proof.
And even if there were frankly, I think we don't realistically have the historical data to identify what those are today.
就算有,说实话,我觉得我们现在没有历史数据来识别它们。
The other thing that occurred to me as I was reading through the approach to UMI is the sense that particularly to see things in real time, what you've really said is to do this right, I need to wait a whole the borrower-based constant, some sort of a constant reference model, the credit model constant.
But I also need really an individualized risk prediction and ideally a month-based risk prediction because if I want to see what happened in this month, I want to see that I expect this some a month or every given month of seasoning that could be for your loan portfolio exists in the portfolio somewhere.
You want to know, is this loan that went to link when a month 32 was that unexpected or expected?
你想知道的是,这笔贷款在一个月32将到期,这是出乎意料的还是预期的?
So you need really a pretty precise model of risk to be able to see this in something like real time, I mean not real time, but to see it rapidly and quickly and to be able to adjust. And so it occurred to me that the kind of individual risk prediction and loan level and month level risk predictions in the reference model are really critical to being able to see not just with granularity but with speed, what's actually happening in the environment and how it might be changing than the underlying from what the underlying predictions might have expected.
Yeah, that's totally right. If you only have lifetime default probability predictions or you only have those for certain buckets of borrowers and you're not going to be able to do this thing, you won't be able to control for the borrower mix at all. With a reference model that doesn't consider enough individual characteristics. And if you only have a lifetime prediction, then of course you can't compare what's going on in different periods of time. So you really need a model where you have a lot of confidence that the month seven prediction for this particular individual really is a good prediction, at least in relative terms relative to your predictions in the other months and relative to your predictions for other borrowers in that month. If you have confidence in that, maybe think of as if there are months on the x-axis and borrowers on the y-axis, you need to feel like both your axes are really doing a lot of work for you that it's sort of an on-bias estimate. And if that's the case, then you can actually take that point on the matrix if you want to compare it to other points on the matrix and it tells you something meaningful. And of course, if you don't have that, then you can't do that comparison.
Yeah. So I did want to ask, you know, you call this the macro index. You talked about the macro and micro prediction levels of the model. And it's interesting because macro can be a reference to the macro economy, the kind of broader world, but it's also kind of a size metric macro and micro. And so I kind of want to ask the question, like how do you think about the relative importance in any given moment or overall for the micro portion of what you might call the core risk modeling that that upsides being focused on? And it's kind of macro level that's maybe harder to predict. So now, somewhat more measurable through UMI. How do those kind of stack up in terms of how important they are to a lender into a lender's portfolio performance?
Yeah. I might first say they're both really important. They're both important in the context of, you know, fixed income of any kind has this property that you can lose a lot more money than you can make. That's the nature of fixed income. And that means, you know, generally anything that can meaningfully increase your default rates is something you're really going to care about. And certainly both the macro and the micro here fall into that bucket. If you get those really wrong, it's going to really affect the return you were expecting.
Now, having said that, if you were to just force a competition between the macro and the micro, how much can loss is very based on macro and how much can loss is based on micro? I mean, frankly, then it's not even close because the macro, you know, you can get, you can get a period of time that's three or four, maybe in an extreme case, five times as bad as another period. In micro, of course, you can get borrowers, not just theoretically, but even identifiably, for example, in our model, you can identify borrowers who are like 80% likely to default, and you can identify borrowers who are 0.8% likely to default. So you're talking about a 100x spread between the highest and lowest risk in micro, and you're talking about a 5 to 1 spread in the highest and lowest risk in macro. And so, of course, it's so much more important to get the micro right than the macro right.
There are so many more ways that even in the best of times, if you try to go to market and underwrite with an extremely poor performing model, just everything will go wrong. Because not only because your model will be wrong, you face adverse selection, because other vendors will pick off at lower APRs, the better borrowers, and just so many things can go wrong in micro, whereas in macro, things can also go wrong, such as, you know, when you go from a really, really unreasonably good period, like 2021, to really sort of sharply bad period, like 2022.
And that's going to significantly and negatively impact lender returns, but it's still going to be on, you know, if we're talking about annualized return impact, I mean, depending on what your risk mix is, and you're still talking, you know, you can count it on your two hands, like the number of percentage points of impact that's going to have, whereas if you get the micro wrong, I mean, there's really no limit to how much money you can lose doing this, and of course, on the flip side, you know, when things are going well, micro is what enables you and has enabled the lenders that use our platform over the years to be able to make dramatically more income running a lending business, because micro is what enables you to confidently expand your approval box while holding your risk levels constant.
So if you can improve 50% or 100%, or 200%, as many borrowers as you previously could, but you get the same risk levels, then of course, you know, something now you're able to have meaningfully change the amount of lending and helping generated.
Yeah, interesting. Well, I want to dive in a different topic. You made this comment about like if you can model out if the world, the macro got 50% worse, or I'd love to say 50% better.
Sometimes I worry that we talk about the macro. We only talk about bad macro, I'm talking about macro getting worse and protecting, not the fact that particularly from where we sit, as we're recording this, there's a lot, probably more upside for the macro getting better than substantially worse over the next at least 12 or 18 months.
But the interesting thing is you haven't talked really about what I would consider traditional macro variables, right? Like most people when they talk about how is the macro doing, you know, you have a UMI, you'll talk about where it's at. But most of you look at inflation, unemployment, interest rates, maybe savings rates, things of this nature that are very clearly tied to what we think of as a macro economy GDP or something like that.
Is there a relationship or those part of the UMI model, talk to me a little bit about how like traditional views of what is happening in the macro relate to the upstart macro index or how you think about the impact of macro and the lending portfolio?
Yeah, they're super correlated in short. The upstart measured UMI, we like it because it has the nice property that it's directly applicable to the math you want to do on lending. And because it's really specifically designed to tell you this period is a period in which you can expect twice as many dependencies on the same bar or pool as that period, you know, it lets you do math in a very precise and direct way.
But of course, it would be really concerning if this index that's meant to measure the macro is totally unrelated to the sort of traditional macro economic variables, which of course, kind of though each one may be able to tell a part of the story, they are collectively, you know, a pretty good description of the things that we care about in the economy.
And so we have that's been an important part of developing the UMI, is actually building a sister model that tells us what we haven't found a nice sort of externally marketable name for it yet. But you think about there's sort of UMI as measured in the sort of collective repayment rates of the of all upstart platform originated loans where we have access to the data. But then there's UMI as you would predict based on what you're seeing from the sort of official macro economic data, the unemployment rate, the inflation rate, the personal savings rate.
And what you want is you want to see that these two measures, they sort of internally measured UMI and the externally inferred UMI are largely moving together, highly correlated and kind of moving together. And that's exactly what we see, we've been able to see that.
And actually, you can, you know, the maybe short and snappy version of this is if you just want what single variable released by the Fed can tell you roughly where the UMI is going. And the answer would be the personal savings rate.
And that of course is a bit cheating because the personal savings rate itself is a bit of an amalgamation of a bunch of variables. It's, you know, looking at personal, probably looking at personal income and personal expenditures. But of course, what makes up personal income, you know, people have to work. So there's employment rates baked into that. There's wage and wage growth baked into that.
And of course on the personal expenditure side, there's sort of your real rate of spending and then there's the inflation rate. And so you kind of got this one variable that Fed publishes, you know, the end of every month and it tells you roughly the things that really matter, unemployment, inflation, spending and wage growth. And the net of that sort of is like how much money people have left over, which is a really good proxy for, you know, how much money people are going to have available to service their debt.
And if you just look at that one variable, that's probably like, you know, mostly, mostly correlated with how we've measured UMI over the past years. It's a, yeah, it does seem like a I won't say a cheating variable, but it is an amalgamation that takes into account a number of the things that people traditionally think of as pretty impactful to at least, particularly unsecured credit where there's, you know, it's kind of the, I won't say the riskiest, but the bottom of the payments act in many ways where the first thing to take a, take a hit one time to get tough.
So one thing we haven't talked about today at all, and I'm sure our lending partnership seems to be very upset with me to be this long to ask this question. But, you know, I think there's obviously, when UMI goes up, if that macro gets riskier, there's this question of, is that a direct indication of loans under or overperforming?
And how does the sense of the macro play into how you actually work with a lending partner to assign a level of risk to a borrower at time of underwriting and understand the returns produced by that portfolio? So I think the thing that I hear a lot is like, does a UMI above one, meaning all my loans are underperforming because the macro is high and therefore I'm losing money and that's a bad thing and I should stop lending or whatever.
So talk to you about how you leverage this in the context of partnerships with the originators to kind of calibrate to what's going on and help them understand the level of risk in the environment and that this going into their originations.
Yep. Yeah, so the insure, no, it does not, there's no direct way to say UMI is a certain number where therefore my loans are either over or underperforming to know that you need to know one more thing, which is essentially what UMI were you assuming when you made the loans in question. And that particular thing we call the UMF, the macro forecast.
And if you very roughly speaking, if you just for any batch of loans, if you take their UMF and you then look forward and say, okay, I made this batch of loans in January of 2022 and at the time we had a UMF of 1.0 and now the UMI is 1.5, then that sort of implies that you're going to have actual losses that are 50% higher than you forecast.
And in that case, sort of example, you gave as valid. Now fast forward to more recent times and many of our lenders actually have a much higher UMF, imagine your UMF is 2.0, but the UMI that's been observed since is only 1.8. Well then actually, even though 1.8 is a really high number by historical standards, it's actually 20 or it's actually 10% lower than the UMF that you assumed.
And so that means that your loans were priced as if you were operating in a 2.0 type world, but actually you've been seeing a 1.8 type world and now you're going to see defaults and delinquencies that are running on average 10% lower than you were expecting, which of course means more net interest, more access returns and so returns will be higher than expected.
And of course, it actually matters how this plays out over the whole term of the loan. But just roughly as an approximation, you think about a single point in time, this kind of tells you this ratio between UMI, UMF tells you how things are going to be. And so if you underwrite with a fairly high UMF, then of course there's more room for UMI to positively surprise against that.
On the other hand, if you underwrite with a high UMF, you're going to be passing up a lot of borrowers and pricing a lot of other ones out of converting just because you are assuming that the world is in a really bad place and you want to lend to people who are going to be going through a really hard time. And of course, if they aren't or if other lenders are not seeing it that way, then those borrowers are going to go elsewhere.
How can you help a lender think about, I mean, what a UMI or UMF of 2 or 1.8 or 1.5? I feel like that's not something that at least, as of yet to be great for you, if that became something about which people had an intuition and a natural understanding. It was like a number they were used to kind of thinking about where it made trend and where it may fall.
But how do you think about like what causes a UMI or UMF to get to a certain level? I mean, I think that scenario planning of, you know, if you think about just the Dodd-Frank stress test kind of thing, if unemployment goes here and something goes here like how bad does that get? What will have my portfolio? How do you think about connecting the dots between those concept of what might happen and what that will mean to where these loans could be performing?
Yeah, I think there are two good ways to build intuition around these UMI index values. The first is to go back to that personal savings rate, which is largely correlated, not perfect, but pretty good. And again, it includes the unemployment and inflation, all the pieces. And what you can basically see is that you can think of it as a historically average level of the personal savings rate, let's just be round numbers, call it on the order of 10% roughly corresponds to a sort of normal UMI condition of around 1.0.
And then, you know, what happens, of course, if the personal savings rate goes up, you know, if the personal savings rate goes up to something like 20%, which, you know, basically never happens except in 21 when people were given what's up in the market. Yeah, when there's free money going up to go, are people saved on that? Yeah, exactly. But when you get something like that, then you see UMI basically get cut in half down to about 0.5. And again, I'm just speaking in round numbers here.
And then on the other hand, you can see that UMI values go from 1.0 to 2.0 if you basically roughly speaking, cut your personal savings rate in half, which is on the order of what we've seen over the past 18 months or so. And then, the other sort of way to build intuition is just to look at different periods of time. So again, UMI 1.0 roughly corresponds to the five years before the COVID period in the sort of happy days of free flowing stimulus money.
You know, you've got UMI's that go down to nearly 0.5. And then, you know, stimulus running out, producing that large shock takes you UMI over 1.1.1.1.5. And then, if you were to sort of look at historical values of personal savings in UMI, sort of ask the question, well, how bad can it get? At least, how bad have we seen it get? Historically, probably the answer is something like, you know, in the worst times ever, that, again, in recent recording history, we have all the relevant economic data, maybe something like the worst month of the Great Recession we think UMI would have been in the high twos.
Interesting. I get two more things I want to hit on, and I think we've kind of, at least gotten a good intro for people into this concept. One is, we didn't really talk about this, but UMI, as you've built it today, is really based explicitly on unsecured installment loans, particularly the kind that upstart partners with banks and credit unions to originate. Are there intentions to build something like UMI for other asset classes? Is it applicable to other asset? Like, how do you think about the usefulness of it as a construct or the limitations of it as a construct given that it's really a measurement specifically on a particular category of consumer credit?
Yeah. Great question. So, we don't see UMI as something that you just develop methodology once and it's done. It would be nice if it was like that, but really, it's a very sort of rich surface to explore, because there's not only the question you mentioned, which is the question of, you and my for different products, but there's actually, you and my for different types of consumers, and while maybe on average, they will all move together. They don't, of course, exactly all move together. Their slopes are a little bit different. Their sensitivities are a little different.
And so, what we really are, you can think of the progression of UMI methodologies as going from first, you sort of assume there is just one UMI, quote, quote, working off one reference model. Then you have one UMI that's produced actually by an amalgamation of reference models, and that sort of gets more and more continuous as you go from one to two to N, and then you really get to a methodology that's sort of much more continuous with respect to your reference model.
And then you have a sort of second dimension of UMI methodology improvement, which is really about going from assuming sort of quote, quote, the average bar award to really making it something that were the UMI is interacting with the borrower characteristics, not unlike how we see all sort of the other work we do in sort of prediction realm, is there's just interaction effects going on between almost any given characteristics of a borrower, and of course, those also interact with macron, so those should be considered.
And then the last sort of dimension is the type of loan that it is, and that's true of its size, of its duration, of its type, and so that could be it being an auto loan, a personal loan, a three-year loan, a one-year loan, or any sort of combination of these. And so there's a lot of sort of continuing research into UMI that we're doing.
And having said all that, the good news is that we think even this first version of UMI as a first approximation, if you just want to answer the question of under what conditions will my loans over underperform? And by roughly how much, you're going to get a very good approximation just from UMI V1. That is, it's true. It's built on unscured personal loans, but we look at it in the context of our other products like our auto-refi products.
And again, it's not quite as precise, but it does give you a really close first order approximation of your level of over-underperformance, again, looking at those UMI, UMF ratios of the changes across time. It does a good job explaining, and that gives us more confidence in the methodology because it tells us that there's something very general happening in addition to the sort of many smaller but more specific things going on within each product, within each type of borrower and so on and so forth.
Interesting. I guess my last question for you is, it sounds like this is early days in the development of UMI, like a very solid foundation, but compared to the work you put into understanding microarrisc, it's still pretty immature in comparison and has a lot of room for improvement.
And you also mentioned if you want to get a new tuition, they should look at the numbers. So if people are interested in looking at the numbers or following along as a methodology and kind of the insights coming out of the work into macro and that UMI evolved, is there a place they can go to see those?
Are they published somewhere? Is there a place they can follow along? What's happening? Where could people go to learn more and keep up the date with what's happening to UMI, what's happening to the work and looking into this macro concept?
Upstart.com/slash UMI, just out and we're really excited about it and it's going to get better and better but it's going to have the core data there and there's going to be more ways to engage with and play with it and really understand the numbers. So yeah, go there, check it out, see how those values have changed across time, what they were in different periods of time and I think that will really build a good level intuition for this and certainly it's our hope that this would become a tool of general interest beyond those who are either making loans through our platform or even making loans in general but really we think it's a really good and useful tool to just understand what's going on in the world.
And I look forward to seeing that. I'm actually really excited that there's, we're going to be publishing the data set so kind of a historical data set. I think there's a lot of rich surface area for innovation on top of it. So I'll be excited to see and if any of the listeners have questions or feedback on what's useful or what you'd like to learn more about the concept, please do write to us or write to just me at Jeff at Upstart.com because I think it's actually a really interesting space and would love to have real input from all of you in terms of where we take the research and what we learn next.
All right Paul, thanks for taking the time and joy. So this is I think a great first dive and I appreciate your coming back for your second time on the podcast.
Awesome, great. Thanks for having me. Upstart partners with banks and credit unions to help grow their consumer loan portfolios and deliver a modern all digital lending experience. As the average consumer becomes more digitally savvy, it only makes sense that their bank does too.
Upstart's AI lending platform uses sophisticated machine learning models to more accurately identify risk and approve more applicants than traditional credit models with fraud rates near zero. Upstart's all digital experience reduces manual processing for banks and offers a simple and convenient experience for consumers.
Whether you're looking to grow and enhance your existing personal and auto lending programs or you're just getting started, Upstart can help.
无论您是想要增强和扩展您现有的个人和汽车贷款项目,还是刚开始,Upstart都能提供帮助。
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It's all possible with Upstart in your corner. Learn more about finding new borrowers, enhancing your credit decision process and growing your business by visiting Upstart.com slash 4-Banks.
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