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Moody’s Investors Service

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Business Situation

Moody’s Investors Service is a leading provider of credit ratings, research, and risk analysis for the financial community. The firm’s ratings and analysis services of debt instruments tracks companies covering more than 110 countries, 11,000 corporate issuers, 22,000 public finance issuers, and 94,000 structured finance obligations. The company offers unique tools and best practices for analyzing, measuring and managing risk through expertise and experience in credit analysis, economic research and financial risk management.

For this project, Moody’s primary goal was to provide business analytics to financial services clients, including banks, regarding relevant metrics of the financial instruments of bankrupt companies.

The software vendor initially selected for the project was not able to develop the software effectively.

Approach

InterSoft took a more focused design approach than previous vendors and reworked the internal structure of the platform to make it more functional and internally correct. The Ultimate Recovery Database (URD) developed by InterSoft for Moody’s helps investors estimate Loss Given Default (LGD) based on the capital and debt structure of a given issuer. This gives Moody’s clients the opportunity to take advantage of their unique wealth of data to validate and develop their own LGD models.

Solution

A working prototype was developed within 30 days. As the project progressed an Agile Methodology was utilized throughout the development process in order to successfully react to the rapidly evolving business growth and needs.

Result

The application as well as the ability to electronically disseminate the required information to Moody’s clients was completed within the Moody’s imposed timeline and within budget.

After the release of URD, several other individual systems were identified within Moody’s, related to bankruptcy data and recoveries. Because of this successful project, Moody’s engaged InterSoft to perform a detailed analysis and create an optimized database design for combining these systems into one comprehensive database. The database design supported the combination of a number of discrete databases, including the Corporate Default Risk Service, The Ultimate Recovery Database and the Structured Finance Default Risk Service.

The database design and analysis performed by InterSoft was key to enabling in-house staff to develop the software to provide these unique essential services to Moody’s clients in the most efficient manner.