Steven Harcourt has joined Standard & Poor's European Structured Finance team as Senior Structured Finance Evaluator.

Prior to this, Steven spent seven years at FT Interactive Data and four years at Merrill Lynch.  At Standard & Poor's, Steven will be responsible for continuing to develop the team's new European ABS/MBS Evaluation model.

Peter Jones, Director Securities Evaluations at Standard & Poor's, welcomed this new appointment. He said: 'We are delighted that such an experienced Evaluator has chosen to join Standard & Poor's. As the requirement for an independent, rigorous and credible answer to the intraday valuation and mark-to-market of complex OTC securities problem has grown we have seen a huge increase in demand for our service.  Going forward we will continue to aggressively grow our global asset class coverage and team of evaluators, especially in the critically important complex instrument sectors.'

Standard & Poor's Securities Evaluations, Inc provides independent valuations on over 2.6 million fixed income securities. Its specialist team of professional evaluators, supported by over 100 operations and research personnel, generate daily and intra-day prices for a comprehensive range of instruments.

The team uses proprietary valuation methodology enables to derive clear, considered and timely prices from the full range of information available, helping firms avoid regional pricing discrepancies and other issues on illiquid markets.

Securities evaluations services are provided by Standard & Poor's  Securities Evaluations, Inc, a wholly owned subsidiary of The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Analytic services and products provided by Standard & Poor's are the result of separate activities designed to preserve the independence and objectivity of each analytic process. Standard & Poor's has established policies and procedures to maintain the confidentiality of non-public information during each analytic process.