Risk Pricing in Emerging Economies: Credit Scoring and Private Banking in Iran

Iran’s banking industry as a developing country is comparatively very new to risk management practices. An inevitable predictive implication of this rapid growth is the growing concerns with regard to credit risk management which is the motivation of conducting this research. The paper focuses on the credit scoring aspect of credit risk management using both logit and probit regression approaches. Real data on corporate customers are available for conducting this research which is also a contribution to this area for all other developing countries. Our questionsfocus on how future customers can be classified in terms of credibility, which models and methods are more effective in better capturing risks. Findings suggest that probit approaches are more effective in capturing the significance of variables and goodness-of-fitness tests. Seven variables of the Ohlson O-Score model are used: CL_CA, INTWO, OENEG, TA_TL, SIZE, WCAP_TA, and ROA; two were found to be statistically significant in logit (ROA, TL_TA) and three were statistically significant in probit (ROA, TL_TA, SIZE). Also, CL_CA, ROA, and WCAP_TA were the three variables with an unexpected correlation to the probability of default. The prediction power with the cut-off point is set equal to 26% and 56.91% for defaulted customers in both logit and probit models. However, logit achieved 54.85% correct estimation of defaulted assets, 0.37% more than what probit estimated.