Case Study — 25 Oct, 2023

A Bank Automates the Inflow of Credit Ratings Data for Trading

By Alan Kwan and Bourne Feng

Highlights

THE CLIENT: A multinational commercial bank located in China

USERS:Financial markets team

Automation has been at the heart of digital transformation strategies for a number of years. However, many organizations still rely on manual efforts that can be error prone, result in inefficiencies and stretch already-thin skilled resources.

Data is obviously a critical asset for businesses trying to uncover important insights that can provide a competitive edge. Incredible changes have taken place, however, in terms of the volume of data that is available and the speed at which it needs to be processed, increasing demand for automated data management solutions.

To capitalize on digital processes, this China-based commercial bank established an internal trading management platform to support pre- and post-trade analysis, charting, position monitoring and more. Credit ratings information is an important risk indicator for the system, and the financial markets team wanted to find a streamlined way to manage the inflow of credit ratings data to support the bank's investment decision-making.

Pain Points

Members of the financial markets team lacked reliable credit ratings data that could flow automatically into the trading management platform. This information would enable them to evaluate a company's creditworthiness, rank companies with similar ratings, create meaningful financial benchmarks for internal risk models to understand a company’s financial risk relative to its rated peer group and much more. The team wanted to find a trusted provider that could offer:

  • Extensive historical and current credit ratings with entity and security-level data in one schema.
  • Outlook and credit watch information with corresponding dates.
  • A sophisticated automated data delivery system.

The financial markets team knew that S&P Market Intelligence ("Market Intelligence") was recognized as providing high-quality independent opinions on creditworthiness and reached out to learn more about the offerings.

The Solution

Specialists from Market Intelligence described RatingsXpress® on XpressfeedTM that provides streamlined delivery of credit ratings from S&P Global Ratings. RatingsXpress would provide the financial markets team with:

Extensive credit ratings data from S&P Global Ratings

S&P Global Ratings is synonymous with quality credit ratings, providing one of the industry’s largest databases of current and historical credit ratings with entity and security-level data in one schema.

Credit ratings via RatingsXpress cover nearly one million securities:[1]

  • 9,500 global issuers, including corporates, financial institutions, utility and insurance companies/81,000 securities.
  • 580 sovereign, international public finance and government entities/13,800 securities.
  • 720 U.S. public finance entities/700,000 securities.
  • 16,500 structured finance transactions, including asset-backed, commercial mortgage-backed, and residential mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations/43,000 securities.

An efficient data feed straight from the source

Xpressfeed is S&P Global's powerful data feed management solution that delivers data directly into a user’s workflow. It provides a single integrated data source in item-level transaction files. Data is delivered in packages that are zipped and posted to a secure location accessible via FTP or Xpressfeed Web Service, so users can receive only the data needed.

High-quality support

A 24/7/365 global support team provides around-the-clock assistance on every aspect of the offering and is available via phone call, email or chat.
Key Benefits

Members of the financial markets team recognized that S&P Global Ratings is a leader in the market and well known for high-quality information. Given this, coupled with an efficient delivery system, they decided to subscribe to RatingsXpress. They are now benefiting from having:

  • Access to extensive historical, current and CreditWatch rating data from a trusted provider.
  • Reduced errors by eliminating manual processes.
  • The ability to systematically manage ratings data across geographic regions, industries, sectors and timeframes.
  • Timely and efficient automatic updating of ratings data to stay on top of important global developments in these uncertain markets.

Click here to explore RatingsXpress in more detail.

[1] Coverage as of January 2020.

Learn more about RatingsXpress®

Click Here