Financial market intelligence provider Standard & Poor’s has launched CreditStats Direct as a module of RatingsDirect, the web-based source for S&P global credit ratings and resear
Financial market intelligence provider Standard & Poor’s has launched CreditStats Direct as a module of RatingsDirect, the web-based source for S&P global credit ratings and research, to offer clients financial statement data adjusted by the firm’s ratings analysts to use in their credit analysis.
Ratings analysts make adjustments to published financial statement data in order to reflect better underlying economics, enable more meaningful peer and period comparisons, normalise different estimates and assumptions, and better reflect creditors’ risks and rights. CreditStats Direct offers access to these analyses for North American and European corporates and utilities to inform clients’ own assessments of credit quality and risk.
‘It has long been our practice to make analytic adjustments to issuers’ financial statement data to achieve greater consistency across different accounting methods and get a better view of issuers’ financial position and risk,’ says Solomon Samson, managing director and chief criteria officer for corporate ratings at Standard & Poor’s. ‘The information that CreditStats Direct provides will foster better understanding of the fundamental analysis behind our credit ratings.’
Senior director for product development Luis Cerda adds: ‘S&P’s annual CreditStats reports have been a key feature of our credit research services, and are consistently the most heavily used reports among the 60,000 we publish each year. CreditStats Direct offers this material throughout the year, refreshed more frequently. We’ve now combined this with additional features for clients to compare data for up to 100 issuers at a time and export this information into Excel.’
CreditStats Direct provides six primary categories of financial information: key statistics and ratios, income statement, balance sheet, cash flow statement, capital structure and supplemental financials. Its features include full integration with existing ratings direct functionality and up to three years of historical data.
