The Bank of Scotland´s lending adviser expert system, COMPASS

Faced with a widely diverse range of customers seeking finance for ventures of varying complexities and profiles, and a high level of losses as the result of defaulting borrowers, the need for an effective means of assessing commercial risk has recently become a major concern for banks. This paper describes the background to the need for commercial risk analysis within the domain of bank lending. It reports the development and structure of COMPASS, the Bank of Scotland´s lending adviser expert system, that has succeeded in capturing and modelling the inherent risk of the Bank of Scotland´s lending process. The stages of its development are outlined; the knowledge elicitation process is described; knowledge articulation is examined from the perspective of the expert; the architecture of the system is explained; the consultation procedure is described; and the advantages by-products, and long-term benefits of COMPASS are summarised