S&P CapIQ Adds Fitch Content, Completing ‘Big Three' Ratings Lineup

The vendor is now carrying ratings from the largest credit ratings agencies, including McGraw-Hill stablemate Standard & Poor's Ratings Services, after adding data from Moody's Investors Service at the end of last year, meaning that customers can now access credit ratings from the three main agencies via a single platform, officials say.

S&P Capital IQ began migrating credit ratings from S&P from its RatingsDirect standalone ratings feed to Xpressfeed several years ago, after receiving requests from customers to be able to consume data from the vendor via one feed. Recently, clients began asking for the ability to consume ratings from other ratings agencies via the same mechanism, so S&P Capital IQ decided to add ratings from Moody's and Fitch, says Rick Kanungo, vice president of product management at the vendor.

S&P Capital IQ receives intraday ratings from Fitch via a direct feed, then redistributes these to clients on an intraday, daily or monthly basis, depending on client demand.

S&P Ratings already cover 53,000 corporates, 61,000 financial institutions, 6,800 insurance companies, 970,200 government securities and 85,200 structured finance products. However, Kanungo says that in many cases, customers already subscribe to ratings from multiple agencies to verify their credit assessments.

"Some investors perceive certain agencies as stronger in certain asset classes, and clients often subscribe to multiple agencies to double- or triple-check their credit assessments. Middle and back offices are incurring high costs, in terms of technology and data from receiving datafeeds separately from all the different agencies. The cost is compounded with ongoing data-linking costs across the agencies, and migrating to newer versions from each agency," Kanungo says.

By carrying Moody's and Fitch ratings, S&P Capital IQ hopes to reduce this duplicative cost for customers, while enabling them to take advantage of other datasets also delivered via Xpressfeed, such as company estimates and ownership data.

Kanungo says there is no competitive disadvantage to S&P Capital IQ carrying ratings from other agencies, and in fact, there are advantages for Fitch to be on Capital IQ's platform. "They are very excited as it opens up new delivery channels into our client base. In many cases, it generates new leads for them," he adds.

To add the ratings, S&P Capital IQ had to build mapping functionality to accommodate the different data structures used by Fitch versus S&P's ratings.

"The advantage of S&P Capital IQ being part of the McGraw-Hill Financial Group and as the commercial distribution channel for Standard & Poor's Ratings Services, is that we have a certain level of in-house knowledge of ratings data, so from the technology to the data to licensing, we were able to leverage that knowledge and make it seamless for our clients," Kanungo says.

Clients wishing to consume Fitch ratings over Xpressfeed are must have a direct contract with Fitch, after which S&P Capital IQ will send the ratings at the requested frequency.