CreditCompanion™ in Action: Empowering the Credit Analyst in Commercial Banks

Industry Context

Credit Analysts from Commercial Banks are often responsible for portfolio surveillance, counterparty analysis, and credit memo preparation. For a new loan, they use credit ratings as a baseline and combine them with deep credit risk research to prepare a detailed credit memo forming the core of the underwriting package. For existing loans, they use early warning signals such as market data or financial ratio changes to conduct ongoing portfolio surveillance. This allows them to identify deteriorating credits and flag them for review, ensuring the bank can act proactively to mitigate potential losses.

Through our discussions with Credit Analysts, we identified several key workflow challenges:

• Time-Intensive Data Gathering: Analysts spend significant time collecting and consolidating information from multiple sources to stay current with rating updates and market developments.
• Constant Monitoring Requirements: Keeping track of rating changes, credit events, and evolving market conditions demands continuous vigilance.
• Complex Credit Evaluation: Interpreting detailed financial fundamentals, monitoring portfolios for early warning signals, and ensuring regulatory and policy compliance add to analytical pressure.
• Navigating Economic and ESG Uncertainty: Macroeconomic volatility, sector-specific risks, and emerging ESG considerations make credit assessments more complex and dynamic.
• Limited Access to Structured, Real-Time Information: Fragmented or outdated data can delay credit memo preparation and counterparty analysis, affecting decision speed and accuracy.

These challenges highlight the need for robust tools that streamline data aggregation, enhance scenario analysis, and automate workflows – enabling faster, more reliable, and insight-driven credit assessments.

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:

CreditCompanion™ aggregates ratings, outlooks, and financial data from S&P Global Ratings, reducing research time and ensuring accuracy.
By surfacing summarized insights through an intuitive conversational interface, it supports analysts across key workflows such as portfolio surveillance, counterparty analysis, and credit memo preparation – helping them access, interpret, and apply credit intelligence more efficiently.

Sample Analyst Use Cases:

1. You can summarize sector-level credit drivers and key risks for your counterparty borrower drawing directly from S&P Global Ratings’ latest industry commentaries.

2. Next, you can compare counterparties within the sector to evaluate relative credit strengths and weaknesses.

As an accompanying step, you can use Credit Monitor to look at how this sits in relation to rated entities in the same industry globally or regionally; and also review the probability of credit risk improvement and deterioration. For this automobile’s entity flagged in the exception report, we see that the probability of improvement is only 3.74% vs. the probability of deterioration of 56.14%; with most of the probability of deterioration driven by Market Variables – which indicates that market pricing is confirming the narrative from fundamental based SWOT summaries from CreditCompanion; and is not pricing in near-term recovery in fundamentals.

The Automobiles & Components Dashboard on Credit Monitor for portfolio level surveillance

3. Finally, you can retrieve key financial metrics such as Total Debt and EBITDA for your borrower to evaluate leverage and performance trends.

Conclusion

This case study illustrates how CreditCompanion™ can transform the workflow of a commercial bank credit analyst by automating data retrieval, accelerating research synthesis, and enabling instant access to S&P Global Ratings insights — helping analysts work faster and focus on deeper, more informed credit analysis.

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

This article was published by S&P Global Market Intelligence and not by S&P Global Ratings, which is a separately managed division of S&P Global.