With the subprime mortgage crisis all over the news and reports of lenders such as Countrywide announcing layoffs, consultancy BearingPoint decided to take on the problem headfirst.
"Some of this was foreseen; some of it wasn't," says Christopher Formant, executive vice president of BearingPoint's Global Financial Services. " With some clients, there were efforts going on all along. [Some of them] needed more sophisticated ways of dealing with their defaulted loans and optimizing what their options should be or managing their real estate. And quite candidly, some of them just need to get their bottom-line performance back to a decent zone, so they're taking out a lot of cost."
The answer that the McLean, Va.-based consultancy embraced is a three-part toolkit that allows lenders to evaluate risk and manage accordingly. The solution took BearingPoint several months to create, although the firm had some of its tools a la carte before the toolkit was released earlier this month. "So we said, 'What are things that we can put together into a toolkit for them that could first help them evaluate the extent of what their current situation is ?'" Formant says. "Good or bad, you've got to know it."
