A Bank Enhances Its Lending Processes to Minimize Negative Exposures

Many financial institutions welcome the return of higher interest rates, but it also brings a share of risks. A potential recession, peaking net interest margins and the prospect of notably larger loan losses have created a challenging backdrop.^[1] (Click here for more information on stress events at banks.)

This U.S.-based commercial bank lends to mid-market public and private companies. The economic environment of the past months had the executive team concerned about the credit quality of its loan portfolio, as rising interest rates put pressure on borrowing costs for clients. Members of the underwriting team, in turn, became concerned about inaccurately assessing risks associated with the company's loans, possibly causing costs to significantly exceed earnings. They felt they needed to upgrade their due diligence processes by looking at additional data that could reveal potential weaknesses across industries and companies.

Pain Points

Uncertain market conditions revealed weaknesses in the underwriting team's due diligence processes and the possibility of mispricing loans. Members of the team wanted additional information to bolster their credit risk analysis and take a closer look at how peers were performing. In particular, they wanted access to:

• High-quality credit ratings at both the issuer and issue level.
• Complementary research outlining the rationale behind a rating, as well as commentaries on the state of credit markets and where things were likely headed.
• Productivity-enhancing workflow tools to easily zero in on areas of interest and be alerted to relevant rating actions as they occurred.
• Information from a wide range of well-known brokerage firms, with strong search capabilities to quickly find companies and industries of interest.
  
  

The company had been a long-standing client of S&P Global Market Intelligence ("Market Intelligence") for a range of services and contacted the firm to discuss additional capabilities.

The Solution

Specialists from Market Intelligence first described Ratings Direct®, the official source for S&P Global Ratings credit ratings and research. Ratings Direct combines extensive credit ratings intelligence with comprehensive market data, credit risk indicators and dynamic visualization tools, all on a single platform. The specialists then described the Aftermarket Research collection that features 35+ million analyst research reports from 1,800+ providers. Together, these capabilities would provide the underwriting team with:

Key Benefits

Members of the underwriting team had an opportunity to test RatingsDirect and the Aftermarket Research and were impressed with the quality and coverage of the information and the productivity-enhancing tools that made it easy to utilize the capabilities. They subscribed to both services and are now able to:

• Uncover an issuer's credit story, its rating history, outlook and potential drivers of upgrades/downgrades to further evaluate creditworthiness.
• Quickly visualize the ratings distribution of issuers and use filters to obtain a tailored view by sector, location, ratings type and more to dig deeper.
• Create customized push alerts for critical credit ratings changes to easily monitor exposures.
• Review the underlying scores and factors behind a final credit rating to differentiate between peers with the same credit rating.
• Dive into industry articles that cover corporates, financial institutions, structured finance and more, as well as Industry top trends or sector research.
• Quickly gain access to thousands of analyst reports from well-known brokerage houses and market research providers to obtain in-depth company and industry analyses.
• Preview thumbnail views of an Aftermarket Research report before downloading to understand the content and layout.
• Compare Aftermarket Research reports with a unique side-by-side preview capability to assess the different views of analysts.