Massage your loan data with Excel

by Linda Westfall
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Using examiner's disks. A wonderful tool for spotting fair lending problems is an examiner's disk from your data processor which includes the entire loan file on the disk in a format that can be pulled into an Excel spreadsheet. The data shows every field on every loan record: original balance, current balance, all the dates, etc. You pick the fields you want, such as interest rate, collateral description, etc., and bring those into Excel. When you get the data into Excel, you can do all kinds of neat things with it. For example, you can sort it down and filter it down to just loans with a real estate collateral code. You can filter it down to only consumer loans, so you can check the accuracy of the APR. You can also select a certain type of loan you want to look at and do a fair lending report with loans sorted by interest rate, allowing you to compare rates charged to males and females in instances where the name allows you to determine gender.

First published on BankersOnline.com 4/30/01