Waters Rankings 2020: Best Credit Risk Solutions Provider—Moody’s Analytics

In the current economic crisis, lending institutions are faced with a new world in which they must understand credit risk with often limited data available. “We have seen that credit-relevant events can happen suddenly; the best-prepared clients will be those who have automated the gathering of their analytics,” says Nihil Patel, managing director at Moody’s Analytics. “Our clients need to make credit decisions quickly, which means they need to process many different pieces of information. To inform those decisions, they’re looking for a 360-degree view of their customers, comprising payments, financials, and other relevant information, and that allows them to conduct fast but comprehensive reviews.”

Moody’s Analytics has been helping clients automate the processes that generate these real-time analytics by further enhancing its existing RiskCalc offering, designed to enable firms to evaluate default and recovery rates using specialized models that generate risk calculations and analysis. Moody’s Analytics and Numerix, with its OneView platform, have traded this award back and forth over the years, and Moody’s Analytics returns to the winners’ circle in 2020 after Numerix won the category last year.

Patel says Moody’s Analytics efforts over the past year were largely focused on delivering clients with comprehensive views of their portfolios. “To that end, we added new alternative data sources and other metrics to the RiskCalc solution. We also integrated the Moody’s Analytics Credit Sentiment Score tool, which uses natural-language processing and text analytics of news media to identify signals of credit impairment in companies. This tool helps clients assess credit-related news more efficiently and have an earlier and deeper understanding of the impact of these events,” he says.

Currently, Moody’s Analytics is enhancing the early warning system within the RiskCalc solution, combining multiple metrics produced by multiple Moody’s Analytics products into one aggregate risk score. “Being able to view their portfolios’ most important credit metrics in one dashboard will allow clients to shift their focus from manually aggregating data to risk management,” Patel says.