Since my update in September, we’ve experienced a government shutdown (the longest ever), new indications of a fairly robust and resilient economy, and emerging cracks in the credit market as observed in the increased reliance of banks on the Federal Reserve’s repo facilities. This puts us in an odd position: businesses remain uncertain about the outlook while not having enough tangible evidence of consumer weakness to justify investments in collections and risk-management resources.
Augment at a Glance
Regarding Augment Analytics, in the past 2 months we have signed 2 new clients adding 2 consultants to support them, we added 1 consultant at an existing client, and 8 team members were extended across 4 clients! We also had 1 consultant successfully wrap up their modeling project. We have also been informed by two other clients, affecting 3 team members (who have already been informed), that current engagements will wrap up at year-end due to budgetary limitations. Finally, we have added 9 net new consultants to the platform; and, today the platform of available consultants stands at 118.
New, Existing, and Prospective Clients
We signed a small fintech credit infrastructure company with the expectation that Augment will support their analytics and risk management needs when staff augmentation is the best solution to the problem. Hopefully there will be some exciting new opportunities coming up in the near future!
We also signed a large, privately held consumer finance company to support their analytics needs. We have two analysts who have just started and will support the client over the next 4-6 months.
Activity with our two new “direct” clients (who were previously supported through third-party managed service providers) is going well. Our top 30 bank client is actively interviewing one of our data scientists for a model risk management role and has provided glowing feedback related to the credit analyst who started supporting them in September. Our tax preparation client is sending new staff augmentation positions to us almost weekly but so far the roles are more junior than our traditional analytics/risk management focus. With that said, we are leveraging our recruiting resources to identify quality candidates who are already in our team member’s network to support those roles. Hopefully we will see more risk and analytics roles coming from these clients soon.
One of our existing clients, a publicly traded fintech, has onboarded a senior credit analytics resource to help them enhance their credit strategy to enable business expansion in 2026.
The project that successfully wrapped up was a model refit exercise for a private equity client that began over the summer. It was completed on time and to the complete satisfaction of the client!
We have several opportunities that we are currently pursuing but December isn’t a great time for new business. One I will specifically mention is a growing credit union interested in how Augment Analytics can support their data and analytics strategy roadmap. Like many others, they have put conversations on hold until January. As such, I expect the next 30 days to be quiet from a business development perspective but am hopeful that we will see a pick-up when everyone returns from their holidays.
In-Demand Job Families
Regarding our highest priority resource needs, while there is nothing imminent, the primary areas of interest from clients over the past several months have been in two specific areas and I continue to appreciate your referrals:
- Model validation / model risk management
- Credit risk analytics
Have a happy holiday season and let’s start gearing up for what the future holds in 2026.
