It isn’t often that a speech from financial regulators elicits whoops of joy from the banking sector. But when a UK regulator recently called for external solutions to help more banks implement internal credit risk modelling, it inspired audible sighs of relief and expressions of delight from a group of people who have quietly been working on exactly that – some over the past months; others for more than a decade.

Banks were never explicitly disallowed from using external data to build internal