[swasheck]

I got my start as a DBA working for a company that was founded to serve as oversight for this process. We'd assign a risk label to a loan (from the originator) and then weight our aggregate risk against the documented risk of the financial instrument (a security from the "bank"). Finally, there was a group within the company to follow up with the loan servicers to ensure that they were properly servicing (erm, collecting) loans within that instrument.

It was insane how many new dimensions we'd have to create (on what seemed like a daily basis) for the variety of security and documentation types that the banks would generate.