Smarter Ratings Advisory and Structuring Insights with CreditCompanion™

Industry Context

Ratings‑advisory and structuring teams in investment banking evaluate rating outcomes, binding constraints, peer benchmarks, and downside stress‑testing scenarios. Their work typically involves modelling core credit ratios (e.g., leverage, coverage, liquidity); assessing structural features and recovery‑rate impact; and translating analytical results into concise rating narratives and actionable levers for issuers and investors

Through our discussions with Ratings Advisory, we identified several key workflow challenges:

• Heightened Ratings Scrutiny: Regulators and rating agencies require clear evidence of downside resilience, liquidity buffers, and disciplined financial policy.
• Methodology and Agency Differences: Changes in criteria and differences in adjustments, notching, and recovery assumptions across agencies make benchmarking and rating analysis more complex.
• Data, Modeling, and Event Risk: Gaps in disclosure, such as collateral history, carve-outs, or pro-forma items, and uncertainty in stress-testing assumptions can complicate risk assessment and structuring decisions.

Introducing CreditCompanion™ on RatingsDirect^®:

As the official source for S&P Global Ratings credit ratings and research, RatingsDirect^® from S&P Global Market Intelligence delivers credit risk insights on a powerful single platform. With AI-powered search, comprehensive market data, credit risk indicators, and dynamic visualization tools, users can efficiently analyze credit performance and trends across industries, companies, and securities worldwide.

Embedded within RatingsDirect^®, CreditCompanion™ is a GenAI assistant that helps users uncover, analyze, and summarize credit research, automating information retrieval, trend analysis, and peer comparisons to enhance productivity.

Key Features:

• Efficient Access to Ratings Research: Intuitive chat interface for rapid access to S&P Global Ratings research and data.
• Comprehensive Credit Summaries: Generates company summaries, peer comparisons, and ratings lists.
• Rapid Information Compilation: Quickly synthesizes insights on entities, peers, sectors, countries, and macro-credit themes.
• Insightful Data Extraction: Extracts insights from over 1 million credit ratings and three years of credit research from S&P Global Ratings.
• Reliable and Transparent Information: Links directly to underlying S&P Global Ratings source documents for validation and confidence.

How CreditCompanion™ Addresses These Challenges:

• Clearer Rating Drivers: Summarizes key rating drivers and recent rating actions from S&P Global Ratings research, supporting more consistent advisory output.
• Peer Benchmarking Support: Provides numeric and narrative peer comparisons to support rating positioning and notching discussions.
• Stress and Sensitivity Framing: Highlights sector and macro trends discussed in research to help teams focus on relevant stress scenarios and sensitivities.
• Consistency in Analysis: Supports more consistent credit narratives by aligning peer context, rating drivers, and sector trends in one workflow.

Sample Use Cases for Ratings Advisory / Structuring:

1. Identify the most material macro scenarios that could affect an entity’s rating and understand the transmission channels.

2. Describe recent changes in ratings criteria relevant to an entity and explain potential implications for the rating and key ratios.

3. Analyze how regulatory, tax, and accounting treatments affect an entity’s credit metrics.

Other Prompts:

1. Describe recent credit trends in [Industry] that could influence rating actions or outlooks.
2. [Data Query] Provide a peer‑comparison table for @<entity_name> (e.g., leverage, coverage, liquidity, and size/scale metrics).
3. Which peers show meaningful reliance on parent, group, or government support, and how is that reflected in ratings outcomes?

Conclusion:

For Ratings Advisory and Structuring professionals in investment banking, CreditCompanion™ streamlines synthesis of rating drivers, peer positioning, and sector and macro risk trends. By supporting consistent analysis and clear stress-scenario framing, it enhances advisory efficiency and defensible credit narratives.

Disclosures for this article from S&P Global Market Intelligence: https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/legal/disclosures#sp-global-market-intelligence