With over one hundred years of experience in evaluating creditworthiness, an award- winning portfolio of credit risk management software and services, and a global workforce, Moody's is uniquely prepared to serve credit-sensitive markets in a period of renewed capital formation and emphasis on risk management.
For further information about our business, history and geographic presence, refer to About Moody's.
Our Mission and Values
We are committed to our mission: To be the world's most respected authority serving credit-sensitive markets. To read Moody's Mission and Values,
click here.
Our Business Principles
Our Businesses
Our Moody's Investors Service business provides credit ratings and produces research covering corporations, government entities and structured finance securities worldwide. Moody's ratings help investors assess credit risk, and our goal is to offer the most sought-after credit opinions for every sector of the fixed income market.
Our Moody's Analytics business delivers industry-leading products and services for credit risk management. By offering software, quantitative credit assessments, economic analysis and data, training and related professional services, we enable customers to engage in sophisticated risk management and investment analysis.
The publicly disseminated credit ratings provided by Moody's Investors Service play an essential role in financial markets and deliver value to a broad range of market participants.
Investors
Our ratings contribute to fixed income investors' assessment of risk by providing well-known standards to describe credit quality across debt sectors and regions. Moody's opinions are anchored in rigorous analysis of credit quality through the economic cycle. Ratings also provide an independent perspective on credit risk that can be utilized for portfolio management and counterparty risk measurement.
Issuers
We help broaden borrowers' access to global capital markets. The relevance and widespread use of our ratings in the investor community enable Moody's-rated issuers to access a deeper pool of potential investors.
Other stakeholders
Ratings are used by a broad range of other stakeholders, including regulators, legislators and academic researchers. The transparency of our ratings process is supported by relevant and timely communication, including in-depth reports on rating methodologies and analytical practices.
Broad geographic and product coverage
Our credit opinions cover the debt of approximately 12,000 corporations, 25,000 local and state governments, 110 sovereign nations and 16,000 structured finance transactions, as of December 31, 2009. The chart above illustrates annual issuance of corporate, financial institutions and structured finance bonds rated by Moody's or other major rating agencies.
Moody's Analytics meets the needs of a diverse global customer base that includes commercial banks, insurance companies, investment managers, securities dealers and the public sector. Below are just a few illustrations of how customers use our products.
Institutional investors
The assessment of credit risk is an essential component of an institutional investor's portfolio management process. Leveraging the expertise of Moody's Investors Service, Moody's Analytics delivers timely and relevant research products that support the work of asset management professionals, especially those who focus on the fixed income market. Subscribers gain access to in-depth analysis and topical research that provide perspective on the credit fundamentals of individual borrowers as well as on industry, regulatory and economic factors that impact risk in markets worldwide.
Commercial banks
To support new loan origination and the monitoring of existing exposures, commercial banks must conduct rigorous credit risk assessments of their portfolios and counterparties. Banks also need tools to analyze their liquidity risk, asset-liability profiles and economic and regulatory capital positions in order to manage their balance sheets and meet regulatory requirements. Moody's Analytics provides a wide range of software tools to meet these needs. When deployed enterprise-wide, our risk management software platform becomes a critical component of the analytical workflow at many of the world's leading financial institutions.
We also offer extensive credit and financial training services for bank personnel. Our targeted professional development programs help banks align their employees' skill sets with strategic business objectives and stay abreast of new techniques to manage emerging challenges.
Fixed income trading desks
Fixed income traders are always seeking an analytical edge in highly competitive securities markets. Our Market Implied Ratings (MIR™) and Expected Default Frequency (EDF™) products enable traders to readily identify securities that are trading "rich" or "cheap" relative to their ratings.
Our proprietary EDF™ metrics are based on a leading-edge technique for estimating a company's default probability based purely on quantitative factors such as market capitalization, equity volatility and capital structure.
MIR™ translates credit and equity market pricing signals into Moody's universally recognized ratings scale, allowing users to easily compare these information sources and identify investment opportunities.
Securities dealers also turn to Moody's Analytics to assess the intrinsic value of complex and illiquid instruments. When market prices are unavailable or insufficient for portfolio valuation, Moody's Analytics has an answer. Our award-winning Structured Finance Workstation integrates economic forecasts, cash flow analytics, loan-level collateral analysis, and stress testing into a single platform that delivers cash flow valuations for a wide variety of securitized instruments.
Insurance companies
To manage increasingly complex global risks and respond to regulatory scrutiny, insurers are adopting best practices in risk management. We are adapting our commercial banking tools for use in the insurance industry, and helping customers meet the pressing need to develop and deploy robust credit risk management policies, procedures and systems.
Governments
For effective management of fiscal, regulatory and other public finance issues, governments at the national and local levels need to monitor and make projections about economic conditions. Our extensive econometric modeling expertise, credit forecasting and stress-testing capabilities - together with our industry-leading data sets of economic and demographic statistics - support regulatory and legislative efforts all over the world. As an example, our regional economic forecasts are part of the tool kit used by various banking regulators when examining lending institutions.
