Case Study — JUNE 24, 2025
A D&O Insurer Strengthens Underwriting to Avoid Unwanted Exposure in a Volatile Market
THE CLIENT: : A large U.S.-based insurer
USERS: The D&O underwriting team
So far, 2025 is being seen as a year of promise and peril, according to S&P Global Ratings. The descent in policy interest rates and soft landings in many major economies may deliver on the promise of more favorable credit conditions. However, intensifying geopolitical and trade tensions increase the peril present in an already tumultuous environment.
Corporate executives face a multitude of complex risks that will challenge Directors & Officers (D&O) insurers. This includes the potential negative impact of tariffs on economies, supply chains and credit conditions. It also includes the threat of cyberattacks given increasing technological dependency and global interconnectedness, a complex and ever-changing regulatory environment and the need for borrowers to adapt to changing capital flows as money moves from long-duration speculative assets to safer havens,
Members of the D&O underwriting team at this large U.S.-based insurance company worried that recent stock market volatility and financial uncertainty for businesses could result in more claims. They felt they needed to tighten their due diligence and risk management practices to minimize unwanted exposure and wanted to find a well-respected provider of data and analytical tools to help deepen their risk assessments.
Pain Points
The D&O underwriting team created a list of the most important risks they needed to be aware of, both in the short and long term. They then identified data that could help them flag these risks, price contracts appropriately and monitor potential vulnerabilities on an ongoing basis. This included:
- Detailed financial statement data that is standardized for easy cross-company comparisons.
- Credit ratings for publicly held companies, plus a way to assess the creditworthiness of privately held companies.
- Material company-specific news and events that could impact the value of securities.
- Broker research to see what the market thinks about different industries and companies.
- Insights into earnings calls that could alert them to current issues and longer-term strategies.
- Details on primary and secondary market business transactions, including public offerings, private placements and mergers and acquisitions that could cause stock price fluctuations and possibly initiate investor litigation.
- Data on company relationships to have a full view of a corporate structure and possible weak links with parents and/or subsidiaries.
Members of the team realized this was a long list but were hopeful that they could find one firm to provide much of the information. They also wanted access to analytical tools that could help them quickly evaluate the data, easily do peer group analysis and more. The team knew that S&P Global Market Intelligence ("Market Intelligence") was a leading information provider and reached out to learn more about the firm's capabilities.
The Solution
Market Intelligence specialists described an array of relevant datasets available on the powerful S&P Capital IQ Pro desktop. The datasets would enable the investment team to:
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Easily assess the financials of public and private companies. |
S&P Capital IQ Financials provides global standardized financial statement data for 180,000+ public companies, including 95,000+ active and inactive companies and As Reported data for 150,000+ companies. S&P Capital IQ Standardized Financials enables users to extend the scope of their historical analysis and back-testing models with consistent data from all filings of a company's historical financial periods, including press releases, original filings and all restatements. Data is available at numerous frequencies. The Private Company Financials dataset provides 200+ standardized financial statement items for 12+ million private companies globally. |
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Gain a view of creditworthiness for public companies |
The RatingsDirect® is the official source for S&P Global Ratings credit ratings and research with coverage of 1+ million credit ratings outstanding on government, corporate, financial sector and structured finance entities and securities. It combines this essential intelligence with comprehensive market data, credit risk indicators and dynamic visualization tools, all on a single platform. With an AI-powered integrated search function, users can quickly research an issuer or topic of interest. |
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Extend the view of creditworthiness to include private companies |
RiskGaugeTM Desktop instantly provides a clear view of credit risk for 400+ million companies around the world, many small- and medium-sized enterprises. It offers dashboards, high-level portfolio surveillance views, comprehensive business credit reports and more. At the center are RiskGauge Scores ― one score per company that tells the whole story based on a holistic assessment of their fundamental credit risk and market-based signals. Rankings from 1 to 100 show those with the lowest (100) and highest (1) credit risk. |
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Understand a company's corporate structure |
The Company Relationships database contains 11+ million company relationships that exist between companies in the S&P Global universe. Relationship types include acquisitions, investments, investment arms, lenders, affiliates, index providers and more. |
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Stay on top of important company developments |
The Key Developments dataset provides structured summaries of material news and events that may impact the market value of securities. It includes a collection of 2,000+ key developments daily and event types, such as dividends, mergers and acquisitions, buybacks, public offerings, management changes, debt defaults, dividend cancellations, regulatory agency inquiries and more. |
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Understand transaction activity, including M&A |
The Transactions dataset provides the entire lifecycle of primary and secondary market business transactions across public offerings, private placements, mergers and acquisitions, buybacks/repurchases, corporate restructuring, bankruptcies, spin offs and split offs. It covers 2+ million high-quality transactions across the globe collected within 24 hours of disclosure. For underwriters, timely insight into M&A activity is critical. Shifts in ownership, financial structure, or strategic direction can signal changes in risk exposure. With comprehensive, up-to-date transaction data, underwriting teams can stay ahead of potential impacts to insured entities and adjust risk models accordingly. |
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Analyze the implications of earnings calls and presentations |
• The Machine Readable Transcripts dataset aggregates data from earnings calls delivered in a machine-readable format for Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications with metadata tagging. It keeps track of event information for specific companies, including dates, times, dial-in and replay numbers and investor relations contact information. |
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See how market experts view industries and companies |
The Aftermarket Research collection features 32+ million reports from 1,970+ global investment research providers, including small- to middle-market brokers, to help users gain essential perspectives on the companies, sectors and industries they track. |
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Save time with productivity-enhancing tools |
The S&P Capital IQ Pro smart screener enables users to instantly find information across companies, news, documents, research, transcripts and investor presentations. The document viewer incorporates AI-based searches to speed up the discovery process for text-based insights across filings and transcripts. A suite of office tools, including an Excel Plug-in, seamlessly powers proprietary models and streamlines presentations. Users can access a library of hundreds of ready-to-use models and templates, integrate data from Excel to PowerPoint or Word with fewer errors and refresh formulas in Excel with just one click. The Competitors tool helps quickly view peer groups for companies. |
Key Benefits
Members of the D&O underwriting team were very impressed with the depth and breadth of Market Intelligence's offering and how the vast resources could help them thoroughly evaluate potential risks and develop appropriate mitigation strategies. They subscribed to the solution set that was outlined and can now:
- Quickly obtain a profile of a company, its corporate structure, business dealings and supply chain to assess its stability and possible exposure to tariffs and other disruptors.
- Easily evaluate a company's financial strength and use additional datasets to further assess creditworthiness to determine if it is a suitable client and how a contract should be priced.
- Fully evaluate a company's performance relative to its peer group to see if it is underperforming the industry and could be subject to investor litigation due to perceived poor governance.
- Uncover a wide range of market signals — from comments in earnings calls to downgrades in credit ratings to negative assessments by brokers — to be alerted to emerging risks.
- Work efficiently with extensive data from one provider and a wide range of productivity-enhancing tools available via S&P Capital IQ Pro.