Former Associate Professor of Business, School of Business and Economics Wilfrid Laurier University - Waterloo, ON, Canada
Past President, CSRSA Credit Scoring and Risk Strategy Association
Past Director, REMAT Research Centre for Education and Management of Changing Technology
Dr. Leonard first began work in the credit industry during his doctoral studies at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. His dissertation, entitled " Credit Scoring Via Logistic Regression with Random Effects", explored the application of advanced statistical models to credit decisions for small business loans. These models proved to be quite effective and showed increase performance over more conventional statistical methods.
After two years at the Bank of Canada, Canada's central bank in Ottawa, Dr. Leonard joined the Fair, Isaac Companies in San Rafael, California. At Fair, Isaac, Dr. Leonard was project manager on both application and behaviour scorecard development and later was Fair, Isaac's Canadian Representative before their Canadian office opened.
In July, 1990, Dr. Leonard joined Wilfrid Laurier University as a Professor lecturing in courses in Business Statistics, Management Information Systems and Credit Modeling. The credit course explored the many opportunities in the credit field that are presently available for the application of advanced statistical models. Further, as Director of REMAT, Dr. Leonard was in the unique position of liaising with faculty, research assistants and the external constituents - industry, government and the community. In this capacity, Dr. Leonard assisted the business community in their adoption and utilization of state-of-the-art technology and information systems.In addition to his duties at the University, from late 1991 until November, 1993, Dr. Leonard held the position of General Manager, Risk Management Division within CIBC - Canada's second largest bank. Within this capacity, Dr. Leonard negotiated contracts with scorecard vendors; developed, implemented and managed scorecard policy for all lines of consumer credit (including mortgages and VISA); developed a fraud model for VISA authorizations using an Expert System Rule-base; developed and piloted a comprehensive training package for front line lending personnel; developed a rule-base system for account openings and ATM access; and designed management reports for application scoring, credit bureau score implementation and account management. As the Director of Decision Systems at Equifax Canada from 1994-96, Dr. Leonard led a team of 20 statisticians, programmers and analysts exploring creative and innovative modeling opportunities using credit data for the Canadian financial marketplace.
On occasion, Dr. Leonard has been involved with the development of a database management systems for different professional sports and for the healthcare industry in Canada. In particular, he is researching issues pertaining to the development and implementation of a centralized patient record for the healthcare industry as well as being the lead research investigator for a Community Health Information Network in Waterloo, ON. Dr. Leonard has been a leader in applying new technology and creative solutions to a variety of industries. He has authored approximately 50 articles in the areas of statistics, operations research and management information systems appearing in refereed journals, industry periodicals and conference proceedings.