Case Study — Feb 6, 2026
Closing Credit Blind Spots Using Ratings Research and Quantitative Analytics
By Noel Maken
Strengthen Credit Insights through Credit Ratings and Research
Centralized access to credit ratings, analyst research, and sector outlooks to support faster, more consistent assessment of counterparty credit quality.
Leverage Quantitative Models for comprehensive Risk Assessment
Utilize a suite of quantitative models to enhance credit risk assessment and obtain a unified view of a counterparty’s creditworthiness.
For credit teams, speed and consistency matter. Having ratings, analyst research, and sector outlooks in one place can make the difference between a timely decision and a missed signal. Centralized access helps teams move faster, apply judgment more evenly, and stay aligned as conditions change.
Credit conditions held up better than many expected in 2025. Issuers pushed out maturities, financing stayed available, and demand for credit remained firm, even as risks lingered. Looking ahead to 2026, S&P Global Ratings’ Global Credit Outlook 2026 points to a similar backdrop: steady growth and supportive financing, but with sharper differences across sectors and regions, and a higher level of policy and geopolitical uncertainty. In that environment, credit risk can shift quickly. That puts a premium on tighter monitoring and more rigorous assessment.
For insurers, particularly in surety and directors & officers (D&O) lines, credit risk is closely tied to the financial health of their customers. Surety insurers are exposed when contractors or businesses fail to meet obligations, often with limited recovery. D&O insurers face rising claims when litigation, regulatory scrutiny, or governance failures accelerate, especially during periods of corporate stress. In both cases, economic swings, customer credit quality, and claim volatility make disciplined credit oversight essential.
Underwriting teams at a large U.S. based insurer began to worry that rising market volatility and weaker counterparty profiles could translate into higher claims and more severe losses. Assessing contractor performance risk and corporate litigation exposure was becoming harder, not easier.
To tighten controls and strengthen due diligence, the teams went looking for a well-established source of credit data and analytical tools. Their aim was straightforward: deepen risk assessments and support better, more consistent decisions.
What were the gaps in the existing process?
As the official source for S&P Global Ratings’ credit ratings and research, RatingsDirect® on the Capital IQ Pro platform combines ratings intelligence with market data, credit indicators, and visualization tools in a single workflow. It allows teams to see not just the rating, but the rationale behind it, how analysts are thinking about the risks and what could trigger a change.
Credit Analytics, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence, complements that qualitative insight with quantitative tools. Covering more than 400 million entities globally, it provides risk scores, probability-of-default estimates, financial benchmarking Early conversations with the underwriting teams revealed a familiar problem. Credit information was scattered across systems and sources, slowing assessments, and introducing inconsistency. The first step was to address rated exposures by subscribing to RatingsDirect® on the Capital IQ Pro platform.
Before that move, analysts spent a lot of time manually searching for ratings, outlook changes, and issuer developments. The work was slow, inefficient, and hard to govern. RatingsDirect® helped bring order to that process, improving visibility into rated counterparties.
But it didn’t solve everything. Large parts of the portfolio: unrated private companies, smaller contractors, and project-level exposures, remained outside formal ratings coverage. These gaps became increasingly hard to ignore.
The teams highlighted several recurring challenges:
- Thin and inconsistent private company data: Financials were often incomplete or non-standard, limiting confidence.
- No common way to translate private financials into risk signals: There was no consistent approach to estimating probability of default or relative credit quality.
- Higher uncertainty around smaller counterparties: Limited disclosure made downside risk harder to size.
- Manual processes that didn’t scale: Extracting and normalizing financials required significant effort, restricting coverage.
Moving towards a Unified Credit Risk Approach
RatingsDirect® materially improved insight into rated names and sector trends, but it was clear that true portfolio coverage would require more. To close the remaining blind spots, the team expanded its toolkit to include Credit Analytics.
The goal was simple: one framework that could handle both rated and unrated exposures, applying consistent standards across the portfolio.
Implementing a More Robust Credit Risk Approach
As the official source for S&P Global Ratings’ credit ratings and research, RatingsDirect® on the Capital IQ Pro platform combines ratings intelligence with market data, credit indicators, and visualization tools in a single workflow. It allows teams to see not just the rating, but the rationale behind it, how analysts are thinking about the risks and what could trigger a change.
Credit Analytics, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence, complements that qualitative insight with quantitative tools. Covering more than 400 million entities globally, it provides risk scores, probability-of-default estimates, financial benchmarking, monitoring, and alerts. Together, the two platforms bring research and analytics into the same decision flow.
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Financial Institutions Sector Intelligence |
RatingsDirect on the S&P Capital IQ Pro platform is the official source for S&P Global Ratings credit ratings and research. With over 1 million credit ratings outstanding on government, corporate, financial sector and structured finance entities and securities. As well as providing users a deep insight into the Ratings drivers to understand the underlying Scores and Factors. |
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Informed Decision making with RatingsDirect® |
In-depth research details the rationale behind the rating as well as timely and topical commentaries affecting credit markets globally. Uncover an issuer’s credit story with its rating history, outlook, and potential drivers for upgrades/downgrades. |
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Credit Analytics |
Credit Analytics platforms offers data, analytics, and workflow tools to perform credit analysis, credit risk pricing, and surveillance on public and private entities at the entity or portfolio level. The suite of credit risk models is calibrated on Ratings, defaults, equity and fixed income market signals generating scores and early warning signals leveraging Market Intelligence or client proprietary financials. The credit scores can be expressed as 1 – 100% PDs, 20-point letter grade scale, e.g., bbb+, or 1 – 100 scale, providing a consistent way to look at risk across Rated and un-rated/private companies. |
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RiskGauge Reports |
RiskGauge credit reports cover over 400 million companies providing insights into Ratings, credit scores, credit limit recommendations, drivers of risk, company financials, debt and company structure. These reports can be customized to include sections of choice and can be integrated with credit assessment generated with proprietary company financials. |
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Prospread- Spreading financials onto the platform |
Prospread enables clients to automatically extract financials from their structured and unstructured documents (e.g. jpegs, PDF’s etc.) and intelligently maps these items to a chart of accounts, suggest matches, and allows for efficient financial spreading |
Bringing Credit Intelligence and Quantitative Analytics Together
With RatingsDirect®, underwriters gained faster access to current and historical ratings, research, and outlooks. That made it easier to spot early signs of deterioration, benchmark counterparties, and apply underwriting standards more consistently. Governance improved, reliance on ad hoc inputs fell, and confidence in credit assessments increased.
Adding Credit Analytics filled in the gaps. Quantitative scores, PD estimates, and scenario-based indicators allowed the teams to assess both rated and unrated entities using a common lens. Qualitative judgment was no longer working alone; it was reinforced by data-driven measures that supported earlier warning signals and stronger portfolio monitoring. Used together, RatingsDirect® and Credit Analytics offered a single, S&P aligned view of credit risk, without forcing teams to jump between platforms or reconcile incompatible scales. Analysis could be done on the fly, scenarios tested, and results rolled up across the portfolio.
As one senior underwriting analyst put it: “Together, RatingsDirect® and Credit Analytics formed a tightly aligned solution that integrated credit research and quantitative risk assessment into a single, cohesive workflow for us. Previously, trying third-party platforms meant the teams were forced to move between disconnected platforms and reconcile inconsistent data, whereas this integrated approach delivered a more efficient, reliable, and portfolio wide credit risk framework.”
Integrating credit intelligence with quantitative risk models enabled the team to achieve consistent, portfolio wide credit visibility across both rated and unrated exposures
Bringing credit research and quantitative analytics together delivered several tangible benefits:
- Fewer blind spots: Rated and unrated exposures could be viewed side by side, improving transparency.
- More consistent decisions: Standardized scores and research reduced subjectivity across underwriters.
- Stronger oversight: Centralized workflows improved auditability and made the process easier to scale.
The result was a more disciplined, portfolio-wide approach to credit risk, one better suited to a market where conditions can shift quickly and unevenly. By integrating credit intelligence with quantitative models, the organization put itself in a stronger position to adapt as the cycle evolves.
Detailed discussions with them enabled us to formulate some few key value adds of pairing Credit Analytics with RatingsDirect®.
