ISI Emerging Markets Expands BPR Credit Analytics Tool

Emerging markets data provider ISI Emerging Markets will this week roll out its BPR Benchmark credit risk data service in Poland before expanding it to Russia and other emerging markets next year, as the current economic climate in Europe encourages demand for the ability to evaluate the credit risk of trading counterparties.

Credit analysts and corporate strategists can use BPR to analyze the credit risk of individual or groups of Polish companies utilizing the vendor's proprietary scoring methodology-though they can also set up their own custom scoring in BPR, based on what data points they feel might be more relevant to a particular strategy or placing more weight on factors that may create more risk in a certain industry.

In particular, the service will appeal to smaller companies without the resources to research and develop their own scoring tool, who may previously have purchased credit research on companies on an ad hoc basis, says Gergely Szuchovszky, global product manager of financial data for ISI's Emerging Markets Information Service (EMIS) data product.

The vendor acquired Bogota, Colombia-based BPR - which provides a credit scoring tool for companies in Colombia - in 2008 and has since begun releasing regional versions of the service, starting in August with Brazil, based on the country's growth rate and the need for transparency as Brazilian companies are not required to publicize their annual reports (IMD, Aug. 22). ISI is continuing this initiative by rolling out the service in Poland because economic turmoil in Eastern Europe is creating a greater need for a credit scoring tool, Szuchovszky says.

"Currently, due to the economy across Eastern Europe, companies are facing problems with non-payments from customers, and this tool provides them with an easy, fast and reliable credit scoring system to more closely scrutinize counterparties and assess the risk of doing business with them, to determine the appropriate credit limits... and reduce the risk of non-payment," he says. "There is an increased need for our EMIS BPR Benchmark service because of the growing credit risk."

BPR's credit risk analysis uses data from the vendor's core EMIS database, which covers around 45,000 companies in Poland, 98 percent of which are privately held. So while information on public companies is more formalized in Poland than in Brazil, the vast majority of the vendor's data from Poland is hard-to-find private company data, Szuchovszky says. Users will mainly be local firms, but the service is also valuable to any companies outside Poland that do business with Polish companies, he adds.

In addition, "although core users are often credit analysts, users in sales and marketing roles in Colombia have also been leveraging EMIS BPR Benchmark's screening capabilities as a prospecting tool for finding potential customers, along with their contact details, and we expect to see the same happening in Brazil and in Poland as well," Szuchovszky says.

The vendor plans to release BPR in Russia, followed by India, in the first half of 2012, after which it will evaluate additional markets for BPR on a case-by-case basis to gauge demand for the product, Szuchovszky adds.