The CreditRisk model launched by CSFB in 1997 is widely used by practitioners in the banking sector as a simple means for the quantification of credit
risk, primarily of the loan book. We present an alternative numerical recursion scheme for CreditRisk, equivalent to an algorithm recently proposed by
Giese, based on well-known expansions of the logarithm and the exponential
of a power series. We show that it is advantageous to the Panjer recursion
advocated in the original CreditRisk
document, in that it is numerically stable. The crucial stability arguments are explained in detail. Furthermore, the
computational complexity of the resulting algorithm is stated.