The Essentials
Why Get Rated?
There are multiple benefits from obtaining a credit rating. A credit rating may help your institution or corporation:
- Improve the terms and conditions of external finance
- Diversify funding sources
- Increase the marketability of planned debt issuances
- Communicate creditworthiness to investors and counterparties without having to share confidential information
- Improve internal governance and management
- Benchmark creditworthiness against other entities within the same country or in other countries
Credit Rating Reports may also be used for other promotional or marketing purposes.
Why CI Ratings?
CI Ratings is committed to providing high-quality, forward-looking credit ratings with integrity, transparency and consistency. We have been in the credit ratings business for over 40 years and are supervised by the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) and recognised as an External Credit Assessment Institution (ECAI) in a number of jurisdictions across Europe and the Middle East.
We pride ourselves on delivering high levels of customer service with the explicit aim of developing strong and long-term client relationships. We never “rate to order”. Our ratings are respected because we are independent and rigorous in our assessment of credit risk.
Subject to a high level of external scrutiny and regulatory oversight, we operate to the same high standards as those of our larger competitors, but we are able to do so more cost-effectively.
Who Do We Rate?
We assign credit ratings to banks (conventional and Islamic), non-bank financial institutions (including finance companies and asset managers), corporates, insurance companies, sovereigns, sub-sovereigns, and supra-national entities. We also rate issuance programmes and financial instruments (including sukuk) issued by the above.
Rating Types: Issuer or Issue, International or National
The types of credit ratings we assign include:
Issuer credit ratings – which summarise an entity’s overall creditworthiness and its ability and willingness to meet its financial obligations as they come due. These include long-term and short-term foreign currency and local currency ratings, as well as insurer financial strength ratings.
Issue (bond and sukuk) credit ratings – which provide an opinion of an obligor/ issuer’s ability and willingness to honour its financial obligations with respect to a specific bond or other debt instrument, or with respect to a particular programme.
In addition to the above international scale rating types (which are comparable across countries), we also offer national scale ratings.
National Ratings measure the creditworthiness of issuers or issues relative to all other issuers or issues within the same country and, unlike CI’s other ratings, are not intended to be comparable across countries. National Ratings are used in countries whose sovereign credit ratings are well below ‘AAA’ on CI’s international rating scales, and where there is sufficient demand from capital market participants for such ratings. National Ratings enable the ratings of obligors in a given country to be distributed across a full rating scale (from ‘AAA’ to ‘D’), thereby allowing greater credit differentiation than may be possible under internationally comparable rating scales.
Disclosure Options: Public or Private
Clients can opt at the start of the rating process for one of the following:
- Public Ratings – which are publicly disclosed and made available to investors, counterparties, and others via our website and other platforms. Public ratings are monitored on an ongoing basis and updated at least annually. Public ratings are the most popular option, helping to increase your broader market visibility as well as your access (if needed) to public capital markets.
- Private Ratings – which are provided exclusively to you (the client) and are not intended for public disclosure or distribution by subscription. Private ratings may, however, be shared with a limited number of third parties (up to 150) on a strictly confidential basis. Private ratings are usually monitored. However, private issuer ratings (but not issue ratings) may also be assigned on a point-in-time basis.
Private ratings can be converted to publicly available ratings at any time; but the conversion of public ratings to private ratings can only take place after the publicly announced withdrawal of the public ratings. In the latter case, we update the ratings prior to withdrawal in the interests of investor protection and to deter rated entities from attempting to hide a deterioration in creditworthiness by switching the dissemination type from public to private.
Want to Know More?
You can find information on our credit rating process here.
Frequently asked questions by banks, companies, and other entities interested in a credit rating can be found here.
For pricing information and any other business enquiries, please contact our Marketing Department here.