Diwakar develops credit rating frameworks for financial institutions and corporations, applying advanced analytics techniques to measure and mitigate retail and commercial credit lending risk across the entire customer lifecycle. He serves a variety of sectors including banking, retail, telecom, and the social sector.

Background

Diwakar has been with McKinsey for more than 13 years, serving clients across the developed and developing world. Some of his recent work includes:

  • Assisting two of the largest banks in the Middle East assess the impact of COVID-19 and oil price drops on their credit and investment portfolios. Through bottoms up customer level forecasting and external expert inputs, the project provided a portfolio-level view of potential losses. It also generated client-level account plans to aid relationship managers in offering clients support and restructuring.
  • Helping an Eastern European bank set up their underwriting system for retail unsecured lending. The system combined insights from machine learning with statistical models to enhance predictive power while retaining the transparency and simplicity of classical regression models. The bank was also able to use the same system to assess credit risk on a completely new customer segment.
  • Developing customer origination and collection models for one of the largest telecom operators in Latin America. This included redesigning the account approval process to maximize removal of fraudulent applications, as well as determining the most suitable offering for each customer.
Prior to McKinsey, Diwakar did sub-prime mortgage risk analytics for HSBC North America. There, he was involved in risk-based pricing, loss forecasting, and roll rate analysis.

Diwakar holds an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Lucknow, along with a bachelor’s degree in electronics engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati.