Risk Classification of SMEs by Early Warning Model Based on Data Mining

One of the biggest problems of SMEs is their tendencies to financial distress because of insufficient finance background. In this study, an Early Warning System (EWS) model based on data mining for financial risk detection is presented. CHAID algorithm has been used for development of the EWS. Developed EWS can be served like a tailor made financial advisor in decision making process of the firms with its automated nature to the ones who have inadequate financial background. Besides, an application of the model implemented which covered 7,853 SMEs based on Turkish Central Bank (TCB) 2007 data. By using EWS model, 31 risk profiles, 15 risk indicators, 2 early warning signals, and 4 financial road maps has been determined for financial risk mitigation.

The Impact of Financial Risks on Profitability of Malaysian Commercial Banks: 1996-2005

This paper examines the relationship between financial risks and profitability of the conventional and Islamic banks in Malaysia for the period between 1996 and 2005. The measures of profitability that have been used in the study are the return on equity (ROE) and return on assets (ROA) while the financial risks are credit risk, interest rate risk and liquidity risks. This study employs panel data regression analysis of Generalised Least Squares of fixed effects and random effects models. It was found that credit risk has a significant impact on ROA and ROE for the conventional as well as the Islamic banks. The relationship between interest rate risk and ROE were found to be weakly significant for the conventional banks and insignificant for the Islamic banks. The effect of interest rate risk on ROA is significant for the conventional banks. Liquidity risk was found to have an insignificant impact on both profitability measures.

Localizing and Recognizing Integral Pitches of Cheque Document Images

Automatic reading of handwritten cheque is a computationally complex process and it plays an important role in financial risk management. Machine vision and learning provide a viable solution to this problem. Research effort has mostly been focused on recognizing diverse pitches of cheques and demand drafts with an identical outline. However most of these methods employ templatematching to localize the pitches and such schemes could potentially fail when applied to different types of outline maintained by the bank. In this paper, the so-called outline problem is resolved by a cheque information tree (CIT), which generalizes the localizing method to extract active-region-of-entities. In addition, the weight based density plot (WBDP) is performed to isolate text entities and read complete pitches. Recognition is based on texture features using neural classifiers. Legal amount is subsequently recognized by both texture and perceptual features. A post-processing phase is invoked to detect the incorrect readings by Type-2 grammar using the Turing machine. The performance of the proposed system was evaluated using cheque and demand drafts of 22 different banks. The test data consists of a collection of 1540 leafs obtained from 10 different account holders from each bank. Results show that this approach can easily be deployed without significant design amendments.