S&P LAUNCHES FIXED INCOME RISK MANAGEMENT SOLUTION

Posted October 24, 2008

LONDON – Standard & Poor’s has launched Fixed Income Risk Management Services (FIRMS), which will deliver due diligence solutions for evaluating financial instruments in portfolios, combining several separate businesses and product lines to provide enhanced analytics and greater asset pricing context.

“For both investors and regulators, transparency has come to mean not just more data, but also greater analytics and insight around the financial instruments in exceedingly complex portfolios,” says Lou Eccleston, Executive Managing Director, Fixed Income Risk Management Services, Standard & Poor’s. “The mission of FIRMS is to bring greater commercial analytics capabilities to the marketplace, not just in response to market demand, but also to support the many methodological and transparency enhancements we’ve been making on a company-wide basis to advance the understanding and use of credit research.”

FIRMS’s capabilities include:

• Qualitative and quantitative market research and commentary made available by an independent internal research group focused on helping investors better understand the cross-market and cross-asset class valuations and relationships in complex structured products. 

• Credit ratings information, data distribution and insight delivered to credit professionals through RatingsDirect, Standard & Poor’s credit analysis portal, and through real-time technologies and publications including RatingXpress, RatingsIQuery and CreditWeek.

• Real-time coverage of the leveraged loan primary and secondary markets providing large leveraged loan underwriters and investors with an analytically robust database and research reports including flagship “Standard & Poor’s LCD News.”

• Company cross-tagging of global identifiers, reference data, counterparties and securities to identify global linkages enabling granular risk management.

• Credit risk models and solutions designed to enhance clients’ internal credit rating systems and provide tools for their credit portfolio analysis, including the analysis of probability of default, loss given default, and exposure at default.

• Structured finance models, analytics and solutions offering underlying data, quantitative models and advisory services to the structured finance community, including ABSXchange, an internet portal providing investors with structured finance deal performance data, portfolio monitoring and surveillance, cash-flow analysis, and reporting.

• Independent securities evaluations for cash fixed income and structured finance instruments offering, through Standard & Poor’s Securities Evaluations, independent price evaluations of almost 3 million hard-to-price fixed-income and structured securities daily, and extensive fixed income reference data.