S&P and CSV provide solution for complex security market pricing needs

To help meet clients’ increasingly complex valuation needs, Standard & Poor’s and CSV now offer the industry’s most comprehensive and sophisticated independent pricing services and client support, including direct access to valuations specialists. This alliance enables Standard & Poor’s to deliver more expansive valuations support to buyside and sellside firms that hold or trade these instruments, both in the US and globally in all currencies.

‘With this alliance, clients can access end-to-end global valuation services supported by a technologically sophisticated model-based pricing process,’ says JR Rieger, Vice President, Global Evaluations of Standard & Poor’s. ‘Following Standard & Poor’s previously announced expanded valuations services, clients can now harness our combined industry-leading capabilities to meet increased internal and external demand for consistently superior independent pricing services and support.’

Leveraging the industry’s largest collection of technology-driven modelling tools for illiquid securities and complex structures, CSV’s valuation process incorporates market research, academic papers and industry practitioner journals to reverse-engineer primary market supplied pricing within its sophisticated validation process.  CSV will offer audit trails of the assumptions and theoretical underpinnings of its models to equip clients with defensible, documented and expertly derived pricing methodologies.  

‘CSV’s culture of independence, integrity and customer service combined with Standard & Poor’s capabilities results in a powerful solution to meet clients’ changing needs,’ explains William W Martin, CSV’s Chief Operating Officer.  ‘Customers will benefit from high coverage levels on valuations delivered in existing and easy-to-use formats for these increasingly complex instruments.’

Already a market leader in pricing hard-to-price securities, Standard & Poor’s has provided independent multi-asset class evaluations for more than 35 years. With extended coverage of high yield bonds and complex structured products, including such illiquid securities as CDs, interest rate swaps, credit default swaps, CDOs, CLOs and European structured finance bonds, Standard & Poor’s supports customers’ diverse pricing and evaluation needs. CSV is the only independent valuations provider that employs a patent-pending research-intensive and model-driven process to deconstruct primary market prices and arrive at highly informed independent evaluations for this rapidly growing segment of the global financial markets

Background notes: Standard & Poor’s Securities Evaluations, Inc, a wholly owned subsidiary of The McGraw-Hill Companies, provides independent fixed-income evaluations and equity pricing services for more than four million global securities. 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 received during each analytic process.

Standard & Poor’s, a division of The McGraw-Hill Companies (NYSE:MHP), is the world’s foremost provider of independent credit ratings, indices, risk evaluation, investment research, data and valuations. With 6,300 employees located in 21 countries, Standard & Poor’s is an essential part of the world’s financial infrastructure and has played a leading role for more than 140 years in providing investors with the independent benchmarks they need to feel more confident about their investment and financial decisions.

CSV Incorporated is a leading supplier of complex security valuations.  With a presence in New York and Connecticut as well as strategic partnerships in Asia, CSV focuses exclusively on the pricing of exotic financial instruments around the globe.  The firm maintains an active library of perhaps the industry’s largest collection of valuation tools and models, and is further assisted with the application of its proprietarily-created patents-pending technologies