HOW PHD STUDENT GEOFFREY CHANG HAS USED CREDIT REPORTING DATA TO PREDICT AUSTRALIAN ECONOMIC INDICATORS

Our guest speaker on Wednesday was PhD candidate Geoffrey Chang in the Finance Market Quality program discussed how his industry partner, illion and himself are using a unique data set provided by a major Australian credit reporting body – a consisting of profile and transactional data from over 15 million individuals and entities. Geoffrey has developed a model to use these data in order to predict consumer consumption, aggregated lending and credit, bank lending, household and debt, interest rate (RBA’s interest rate/cash rate) As credit reporting data also indicates lending attitudes and the general economy, Geoffrey Chang also studied how legislative changes can affect those and how we can use credit behaviour such as credit applications to predict future consumption. “By using this model, I hope to identify which credit behaviours are strongly predictive of economic change as well as track potential changes in lending and borrowing attitudes.” Geoffrey Chang is a part of the Finance Market Quality program at CRC where information is used to inform both policy makers and industry stakeholders to help deliver better outcomes.