University Financial Associates was founded in 1990 by two renowned professors of finance to bring state-of-the-art analytical techniques to lenders. The principals bring over fifty years of experience in mathematical modeling and data analysis to financial problem-solving. Our data, analysis, and modeling can help your business make better lending and investing decisions.
At the heart of UFA’s offerings is the ForeScore™ Software Suite, whose components are the ForeScore™ Risk Analyzer, the ForeScore Loan Analyzer™, and the ForeScore Loan Underwriter™. ForeScore™ allows lenders to extract the implications of existing data and then project forward to arrive at a lending strategy, instead of using past results as a benchmark for the future. Thus, the ForeScore™ system evaluates not only borrower credit but also the product structure, the collateral, and local economic conditions. Perhaps more importantly, with ForeScore™, lenders more than just "cover" exposures but take advantage of existing lending markets and conditions.
ForeScore™ allows lenders to recover profitable loans from its pool of applicants and also increase loan volume—where appropriate—while holding expected defaults constant. As a result, nonprime lenders can more safely participate in the expansion of growth industries and other types of lending subject to higher than normal default rates. In a way, normalcy is expanded to a greater pool of opportunities, which contributes to economic growth.
The UFA Mortgage Report, developed by UFA, is the first sophisticated analysis of mortgage risks by economic region. It is a quarterly, user-friendly report of research on mortgage default and prepayment, based on millions of loan observations.
The report provides:
- An overview of the national and regional economic conditions that affect loan performance;
- An annual forecast of default probabilities by state for a loan originated today;
- An annual forecast of voluntary repayment probabilities by state;
- An annual forecast of total prepayment probabilities by state; and
- Graphs and historical data for important economic variables like housing permits, employment growth, and house prices.
Recent reports have covered such issues as best places to lend on mortgage equity, expected prepayment on residential mortgages, default risk for mortgages in bubble states like California, Arizona, and Florida, and the value of information for lenders. Overall, the UFA Mortgage Report is another way that UFA seeks to help lenders both control and understand risk and local economic factors, leading to safer, more intelligent and predictable lending practices.
Founding Principal Dr. Lawrence Benveniste has provided consulting services for major commercial banks, savings and loans, the Resolution Trust Corporation, real estate investment trusts, and financial consulting firms. His services have included advising on mergers, complex financial and real estate valuation, development of methods to project default risk in mortgage loans, and designing incentive oriented contracts. He has also developed an array of financial software products including highly sophisticated mortgage and real estate valuation products.
Dr. Benveniste is currently Dean at the University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management, where he also holds the U.S. Bancorp Chair. Among previous positions, Dr. Benveniste served on the staff of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in Washington D.C., where he helped devise systems for monitoring risk-based capital requirements, intraday exposure from payments systems and deposit insurance reform.
Founding Principal Dennis R. Capozza, Professor of Finance and the Dale Dykema Professor of Business Administration in the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, has extensive consulting experience with lenders and real estate-related firms including Citicorp, Household Finance, Conseco Finance, Providian Financial, FNMA, Freddie Mac, Berkshire Mortgage Finance, and Impac Mortgage Holdings.
Dr. Capozza has contributed more than 100 articles to journals and books and is a leader in integrating the modern theory of finance into real estate and lending. In particular, he has pioneered the use of contingent claims and arbitrage methods to value mortgages and mortgage-related instruments, as well as having written extensively on land pricing in urban areas. Dr. Capozza is also co-editor of the Journal of Financial Abstracts: Real Estate and a previous editor of Real Estate Economics.
Principal Dr. Ryan D. Israelsen is Associate Professor of Finance and the Pasant Research Fellow in the Eli Broad College of Business at Michigan State University. He has published numerous research articles on asset pricing, information, intangible capital, public finance, and real estate finance.