Chris Mann

Chris Mann is the head of wholesale credit risk modeling for Union Bank, which was bought by U.S. Bank in December 2022.  Chris oversees research and development for credit underwriting, stress testing, and reserve estimation.  His team operates out of New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Irvine.  The team has daily interactions with front-line credit teams to update current rating methodologies, create new methodologies and models, and provide ad hoc portfolio analysis.  Chris joined the bank in credit administration, overseeing credit analysis and loan approvals for financials, funds, and sovereigns, as well as overseeing Latin American economic and country risk management.  He previously worked at Moody’s Investors Service in a variety of analytical roles supporting the rating service.

Chris has over 20 years of credit and risk management experience and has published several refereed articles in top journals.  Recent projects have included automating credit underwriting for small businesses and using machine learning to improve credit forecasts.  Outside of work, Chris is an avid data science hobbyist (now entirely in Python though previously in C# and SAS).  Projects have included the analysis of geographical wealth distribution and weather patterns for non-profits.  He spends much of his free time exploring bank data using the Federal Reserve’s FFIEC public data as well as the FDIC’s failed bank dataset.

Chris helped design the Credit Risk Management course, a survey course of several industry risk specializations.  He designed and currently teaches Credit Risk Analytics which helps students learn or improve their data analysis using Python while doing projects similar to those done in the financial industry.

Chris is a Navy veteran from the first gulf war.  He has a master’s degree in applied physics from Cornell and a Ph.D. in finance from NYU’s Stern School of Business.