Informist Credit Standard

Credit Standard has been designed keeping in mind the needs of the credit departments of banks and other lending and investing financial institutions such as mutual funds, insurance companies, non-bank finance companies etc. It is designed to serve all functions and departments dealing with credit to the large corporate and mid corporate segments. This includes the business development function, credit appraisal, credit monitoring, credit risk management, and stressed asset management.

Credit Standard is a new generation product meant to serve the evolving and now dynamic needs of the credit function. Since credit fundamentally deals with risk, the management of this risk is the primary focus of Credit Standard. To that end, the product provides all the information and all the tools to enable state-of-the-art risk management practises. The product offers substantial automation of the credit process, primarily through an MS Excel add-in. Credit Standard includes Data, Non-Data Information, and Analytical Tools all updated continuously.

Data includes all the data needed by the credit function, and all the data disclosed by the company that is in the public domain. The product covers all listed companies, all unlisted subsidiaries of all listed companies, all standalone unlisted companies with revenues of more than INR 100 crore, and all standalone unlisted companies with a paid-up capital of more than INR 100 crore. This totals around 35,000 companies. Not only this, users can add companies on demand for a small per company fee.

Data depth and breadth is unparalleled and includes Balance Sheet, Profit & Loss Account, Schedules, Cash Flow, Ratios, and even operating metrics generally disclosed only to shareholders and analysts. Credit Standard also has quarterly financials and segmental results. The product offers deep data histories going back to listing day for listed companies and a minimum of five-year history even for unlisted companies.

The product captures and databases 7,000 data fields per company per year including on a stand-alone and consolidated basis and across all prevailing accounting formats including Ind-AS. All the data is in a structured database that lends itself extremely well to any kind of detailed and complex query. Users can run any query across 7,000 data fields across 35,000 companies. Essentially, the number of queries that are possible runs into multiple crores! The product guarantees a response time of 60 seconds for any complex query that a user may run. Credit Standard has several regularly used screeners and queries as pre-set templates and users can add their own templates, save these for future use, and share these with others in the same organisation.

Credit Standard provides as reported financials and provides users an easy way of taking the data into Microsoft Excel and then adjusting it as per their view, assessment, and need. Common size data allows like-to-like comparisons and live updated data on Pledged Shares ensures lenders always know to whom their borrowers are pledging shares to. Data on shareholding, which includes Bulk and Block Deals and changes in mutual fund holdings, allows users to check the changing levels of institutional shareholding, which is a key indicator of asset quality.

All data is sourced from primary sources: Annual Reports and Quarterly disclosures for listed companies and Ministry of Corporate Affairs data for unlisted companies. The softcopy versions of annual reports are also available and serve as an important validation tool for the data. This data is updated on an ongoing basis; listed company data is updated from quarterly earnings, annual reports, and exchange disclosures. Unlisted company data is updated every fortnight and includes changes in their financials, shareholding, charges on assets including release/expiry of charge, and changes in their directors.

Credit Standard allows users to do peer comparison not only on financials but also on operating metrics. Industry aggregates allow benchmarking of each company against the industry performance, which is a great tool for both credit assessment as well as credit monitoring.

Apart from corporate data, Credit Standard also provides deep histories of macro-economic data, market data such as share prices, debenture and bond prices, foreign currency rates, and spot prices for commodities.

Non-Data Information includes credit ratings since 2001, information on all suits filed against these companies or their directors in any High Court or the Supreme Court, information on actions of regulators such as SEBI, RBI, MCA etc., information on cases in various tribunals such as NCLT, ITAT, CESAT, SAT, DRT, DRAT, Green Tribunal etc. Additionally, information regarding all the charges created on a company’s assets is available under Index of Charges. Credit Standard also includes Auditor's Report and comments, Directors' Report, and Management Discussion.

Credit Standard also has a query-able database for all debt and corporate ratings. This includes data on all ratings done on any instrument or company by any ratings agency since 2001. This data can be queried on the basis of issuer, ratings agency, rating or rating change, amount, company name, industry or sector, and location. Ratings changes are available in our news service and the database is updated every single day.

Credit Standard has research reports from more than 60 research firms in India and this includes company specific research reports from the broking industry, which does a very thorough job of tracking listed companies, particularly the NSE 500 companies. It also includes research reports on various industries and sectors which provide the user unparalleled access to not only data but also perspective on how the capital markets are viewing each sector and company.

Credit Standard also provides news on all listed companies, including exchange and regulatory disclosures as well as authentic exclusive and breaking news on companies. It also provides news on government, policy-making, regulators, ministries, markets, and the macro economy. This rich news coverage provides both the specific information that the user needs as well as the broad environment in which all financial actors are working

Analytical Tools offered by Credit Standard are cutting-edge and include a template Risk Assessment Model, a Credit Appraisal Model, and a Credit Monitoring Model. The product allows users to build their own models to predict future earnings of any company by choosing a specific CAGR for each specific data point to build a Cash Flow Model. It also includes the Altman Z score for predicting probability of bankruptcy for any borrower.

Not only does this allow users to do serious analysis of a credit proposals it also empowers the users to build what if scenarios through which the he/she can predict under what circumstances is a borrower likely to turn into a non-performing asset. This has the power to revolutionise the way lenders deal with credit risk by enabling them to get very detailed insights into likely defaults and resultant NPA provisioning required in case the economic or industry scenario unfolds in a given way or in case a given company performs in a given way.

We from Informist look forward to demonstrating the value that Credit Standard can create for your organisation and look forward to serving you as a customer as well