BLOG — Sep 2, 2025
Building Resilient Supply Chains : A RiskGauge Desktop™ Story
By Noel Maken and Momina Waqar
THE CLIENT:
An Industrial Minerals Company
USERS:
Credit Risk Department and Procurement team
In a persistently challenging macroeconomic environment, companies operating in international markets face elevated supplier and credit risks. Geopolitical fragmentation marked by enduring conflict zones, renewed sanctions regimes, and tightening export controls continue to reshape trade flows and sourcing strategies. Energy markets remain volatile despite recent easing, with projections of sustained pricing uncertainty due to fragile balances and geopolitical risks around the Middle East and Russia-Ukraine conflict1. Mining sector credit metrics, while stable overall, show stress pockets, a trend highlighted in S&P Global Ratings’ 2025 Metals and Mining Industry Credit Outlook report2, which argues that 11% of metals and mining issuers in Europe and North America are on negative outlook, reflecting vulnerability to cost shocks and refinancing risks.
As an industrial minerals company with a global footprint, the business faces significant supplier and credit risks inherent to its complex, international operations. It relies on a diverse range of critical inputs - from energy and fuel to chemicals, equipment, and logistics services - which are often sourced across multiple regions, with varying levels of reliability. Against this backdrop, supplier credit quality becomes a strategic concern. Financially constrained energy, logistics, and input providers may struggle to hedge against price swings, maintain compliance with tightening ESG rules, or meet delivery commitments, heightening the risk of costly operational disruptions.
The credit risk and procurement team at the company in focus here identified a gap within their workflow for effectively managing their risk exposure. RiskGauge Desktop™ played a crucial role in streamlining their supplier risk management with a detailed focus on assessing the credit quality of their counterparties. With its advanced analytics, RiskGauge Desktop™ facilitated quick and automated credit risk assessments of their primary suppliers. The automation allowed efficient evaluation of these counterparties’ financial stability, significantly reducing the time required for manual assessment. This has led to more informed decision making and a reduced risk of engaging with financially unstable counterparties.
Pain Points
In the absence of a risk management tool, the teams involved faced extensive delays and difficulties in the counterparty selection process, hindering their ability to operate efficiently. The Head of Procurement, along with the Credit Risk lead, highlighted the key challenges they wanted to mitigate with the tool:
- Limited information available for private suppliers: Working with a wide array of counterparties across the globe, who typically have limited financial information, posed a key challenge in assessing the creditworthiness of small private suppliers and manufacturers.
- Inability to assess the different risk factors on a global scale: Unpredictable market conditions required a more comprehensive risk assessment that incorporated external factors beyond the financial data.
- Absence of industry and regional peer comparison: Their risk assessment process evaluated counterparties in isolation, without visibility of a company’s position within its peers, increasing the risk of adding relatively underperforming suppliers, potentially increasing their long-term supplier risk.
- Lack of an early warning system: Once a supplier was selected, ongoing surveillance of those suppliers’ financial health was inconsistent, heightening the risk of undetected deterioration in creditworthiness.
- Information asymmetry: Information across the procurement and credit teams was inconsistent when it came to selecting new suppliers, leading to delays, misaligned decisions, and overlooked risks.
The Solution
For companies with extensive global operations and complex supply chains, supplier and credit risk challenges are significant. Maintaining financial stability across a diverse network of suppliers and customers is essential to ensure uninterrupted operations and robust cash flow. RiskGauge Desktop™ leverages S&P Global’s deep credit expertise and innovative product features to provide a focused risk management experience with automated credit risk assessments for over 400 million public and private entities worldwide, the platform provides early identification of potential financial distress among key suppliers, equipping companies to be better prepared for the likelihood of supply disruptions and cost fluctuations. By embedding RiskGauge Desktop™ into their workflow, organizations are able to minimize manual processes and accelerate decision-making.
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Score Company |
RiskGauge Desktop™ features a powerful Scoring Tool that allows the user to tap into our extensive public and private datasets or impute your own financials to generate a RiskGauge score for any supplier. This score1 is expressed in S&P Global’s letter grades (e.g bbb+, lowercase to differentiate them from a credit rating from S&P Ratings), Probability of Default (PDs) or a 1-100 scale. This standardized approach provides globally comparable, universally consistent credit risk assessments across diverse sectors and geographies |
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Risk Drivers |
Examine counterparty risk from multiple dimensions, incorporating financial risk as well as business and market-driven risk factors. The advanced risk scoring capability allows to incorporate qualitative adjustments, including implicit support considerations and market cycle adjustments. This allows for a comprehensive, granular and well-rounded view of a counterparty’s credit risk. |
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Company Comparer |
Easily create side-by-side views to analyze how a company compares to its peers across RiskGauge scores, key risk drivers, financial metrics and performance ratios. Comparable companies are selected automatically based on the anchor company’s credit profile, plus you can include other benchmark counterparties of choice. |
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Early Warning Signals Framework |
Immediately see important information, including an aggregated RiskGauge score for your overall portfolio on the Credit Risk Dashboard with early warning signs of potential credit deterioration. Track watchlists for 400 million companies across the globe, top movers across your portfolio, and economic and country risk hot spots. |
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RiskGauge Reports |
Download business credit reports available with new or pre-generated credit assessments to see the risk status of over 400 million companies included in the platform, to view and share with your team |
RiskGauge Desktop™ empowers users with powerful analytics to generate a credit risk score (1-100 scale and lowercase letter grade) for their counterparties, ensuring effortless, data-driven decisions. The platform’s detailed breakdown of market, business,and financial risk drivers enables investigation into specific risk dimensions for each counterparty, and helps users understand the relative contribution of each factor to the final score.
Illustrative purposes only. Source: RiskGauge Desktop, S&P Global Market Intelligence. As of Date 07/17/2025
Time savings are key, as RiskGauge Desktop™ allows users to quickly replicate their portfolio and add it as a “watchlist” on the Credit Risk Dashboard for an immediate aggregated view of their portfolio.
Illustrative purposes only. Source: RiskGauge Desktop, S&P Global Market Intelligence. As of Date 07/17/2025
Additionally, as a key component of the monitoring process, the Credit Risk Dashboard incorporates an Early Warning Signal (EWS) framework enabling continuous surveillance of Probability of Default metrics across the entire portfolio. Categorizing companies in red, amber, and green (based on both their overall risk and changes in the PD values), the Credit Risk Dashboard and Early Warning Signals combine to alert users for any breaches in pre-established PD Thresholds.
Illustrative purposes only. Source: RiskGauge Desktop, S&P Global Market Intelligence. As of Date 07/17/2025