A credit ranking model for a parafinancial company based on the ELECTRE-III method and a multiobjective evolutionary algorithm

Abstract Credit rating is an assessment performed by lenders or financial institutions to determine a person’s creditworthiness based on the proposed terms of the loan. Frequently, these institutions use rating models to obtain estimates for the probabilities of default for their clients (companies, organizations, government, and individuals) and to assess the risk of credit portfolios. Numerous statistical and data mining methods are used to develop such models. In this paper, the potential of a multicriteria decision-aiding approach is studied. As a first step, the proposed methodology models the problem as a multicriteria evaluation process with multiple and in some cases, conflicting dimensions, which are integrated to derive sound recommendation for DMs. The second step of the methodology involves building a multicriteria outranking model based on ELECTRE III method. An evolutionary algorithm is used to exploit the outranking model. The methodology is applied to a small-scale financial institution operating in the agricultural sector. We compare loan applications based on their attributes and the credit profile of the customer or credit applicant. Our methodology offers the flexibility of combining heterogeneous information together with the preferences of decision makers (DMs), generating both relative and fixed rules for selecting the best loan applications among new and existing customers, which is an improvement over traditional methods The results reveal that outranking models are well suited to credit rating, providing good ranking results and suitable understanding on the relative importance of the evaluation criteria.