Financial Economist

Fannie Mae
Washington, DC - United States
S: Competitive

Description

THE COMPANY

Fannie Mae provides reliable, large-scale access to affordable mortgage credit in communities across our nation. We are the leading source of funding for housing in America, which means more people can buy or rent a home. We are focused on sustaining the housing recovery, improving our company, and leading change to make housing better.

Join our diverse, high-performing team and make a difference as we work together to enable access to a good home.

For more information about Fannie Mae, visit www.fanniemae.com/progress.

JOB INFORMATION

Apply advanced financial or economic analytical methods and models to such processes as valuation of assets, projection of pricing or risk under varying economic scenarios. Use these tools to develop and quantify risk management strategies for mortgage-based assets or their derivatives. Assess prospective economic and regulatory capital requirements for portfolio assets under varying economic conditions. Develop, or provide guidance to the development of computer applications that perform or produce various pricing, capital requirements, risk management or hedging analyses.

KEY JOB FUNCTIONS
Examine data from segment of housing market in order to perform economic analysis of purchase rates, effects of interest rates, prepayment risk, default risk, or other trends that could affect the products or services of assigned business unit(s).
Examine particular products of assigned business unit and analyze using standard and some sophisticated econometric or quantitative models to assess risk, predict future trends, and determine the efficacy of current analytical standards or models.
Prepare or monitor periodic reports used to ensure accurate model fee reporting, compliance with the Credit Pricing Delegation and pricing model usage policies, and appropriate mapping of data for pricing purposes.
Facilitate model updates by writing technical requirements for new or revised pricing methodologies, assessing impact of changes, and reviewing results. Validate user-defined configuration files used to model unique credit enhancement structures.
Perform economic capital analysis, and other financial analysis when necessary, for review by business unit management, corporate risk management, or senior management in order to support strategic, regulatory, or risk management decisions.
Lead team responsible for development of models to predict changing rent or property values that serve as inputs into credit pricing, economic capital, and loss forecasting models.
Analyze empirical price, rental, fee and other financial data that are the basis for proprietary applications used by partners or counterparties in assessing risk, rating credit, or other functions.

Qualifications

EDUCATION
Bachelor's Degree or equivalent required

MINIMUM EXPERIENCE
6+ years of related experience

SPECIALIZED KNOWLEDGE & SKILLS
Proven ability to develop and maintain business segment analysis using a suite of tools such as SAS, Tableau, R, VBA, etc.
Background in quantitative field such as Finance, Economics, statistics, computer science and business knowledge (Master level)
Able to learn to use multiple internal and external input data sources such as the MMDB tool, RDW, REIS, NCREIF, CCFA and MF Creditworks.
Understanding of numerical and statistical techniques, coding advanced modeling concepts and mathematical equations. Cash flow valuation, computing solutions for financial analysis such as Monte Carlo simulations.
Strong communication skills and ability to clearly explain modeling and analytical results to a non-technical audience.
Experience assessing methods employed by organization to identify, assess, manage and mitigate risks. Ability to recommend techniques for the enterprise, business units, counterparties, etc.
Experience with preparing periodic sector and portfolio reviews for risk committees highlighting key industry drivers and how they impact individual Fannie Mae business units and counterparties.
Background involving the evaluation of current and potential credit exposure of counterparties, internal risk grades and limits, monitor exposure vis-à-vis limits, and engagement in loss mitigation activities when needed
Experience in both creation and automation of segment analysis to include market analysis, historic credit risk performance, profitability (historic and projected), impact of segment on the portfolio, risk/reward analytics and possible pricing strategies designed to achieve business objectives for the segment.
Proven ability to develop optimization algorithms and their implementation that maximizes value subject to the identified constraints. Experience developing potential targets for the business, as well as testing optimization framework in parallel to on-going business. Background creating databases with key data inputs for optimization as necessary, in addition to definition of restrictions or constraints (what are the limitations – capital, staff, risk appetite, maturity/balloon risk concentration)
Experience with design of evaluation metrics to determine if this strategy is working as intended.
Background involving the management of internal client relationships by understanding their business optimization needs and requirements and incorporating their feedback into our output/products.
Ability to work closely with other Financial Engineer/Economists to define objectives (what to maximize) and define restrictions or constraints (what are the limitations – capital, staff, risk appetite, etc)
Ability to develop an analytical framework to determine borrower, geographic market, and asset-level price adjustments for new transactions
Experience with the development of a set of scenarios based on management judgment and analytics that can be used for risk and profitability management (expected, stress, other hypothetical)

Job summary