New Service Helps Investors Determine Intrinsic Value of Complex Securities

NEW YORK, Jan. 14 /PRNewswire/ -- Standard & Poor's, the leading provider of financial market intelligence, has announced the launch of Valuation Scenario Services for Structured Asset Portfolios, a new service to help investors evaluate the intrinsic value of structured assets and complex securities.

The new service is provided by Standard & Poor's Fixed Income Risk Management Services (FIRMS) business, which offers a range of analytics that give investors greater context around asset pricing and the detailed relationships between counterparties and obligors. FIRMS is already working with a number of central banks, regulatory and industry bodies, as well as investors, to help them value complex and illiquid securities. The Valuation Scenario Services launch announcement was made at a conference in New York to unveil Standard & Poor's new Ratings Direct credit portal.

With an estimated $4 trillion in structured assets held in investor portfolios, the ability to conduct systemic valuation analyses that are well-defined and methodologically consistent across all assets fulfills a critical need in the current market. The analytics provided by Standard & Poor's Valuation Scenario Services offer investors a step-by-step, transparent assessment of their structured portfolios under a range of different assumptions and economic scenarios. This information is then reviewed in a collaborative decision support process with clients to help drive an improved understanding of structured credit portfolio value. Standard & Poor's Valuation Scenario Services operates independently from the company's ratings business.

"Market uncertainty, a lack of liquidity and an overall crisis sentiment are combining to create a disrupted relationship between market-observed pricing and the intrinsic value of structured assets on investors' balance sheets," said Lou Eccleston, Executive Managing Director, Fixed Income Risk Management Services, Standard & Poor's. "Our Valuation Scenario Services help investors analyze their portfolios against a multitude of potential economic scenarios to get a much clearer picture of the real value of the paper they are holding."

Standard & Poor's Valuation Scenario Services are supported by the Market, Credit and Risk Strategies team, a newly formed, independent research group that analyzes cross-market and cross-asset class valuations and relationships; the Standard & Poor's Structured Finance Platform and modeling team; and the Fixed Income Architects team. Together, this group of structured finance experts and industry-leading analytics tools are helping to bring greater transparency to structured portfolios.

Analytic services and products provided by Standard & Poor's FIRMS are the result of separate activities designed to preserve the independence and objectivity of each analytic process. Standard & Poor's has established policies and procedures to maintain the confidentiality of non-public information received during each analytic process.

About Standard & Poor's

Standard & Poor's, a division of The McGraw-Hill Companies (NYSE: MHP), is the world's foremost provider of financial market intelligence, including independent credit ratings, indices, risk evaluation, investment research and data. With approximately 8,500 employees, including wholly owned affiliates, located in 23 countries and markets, Standard & Poor's is an essential part of the world's financial infrastructure and has played a leading role for more than 140 years in providing investors with the independent benchmarks they need to feel more confident about their investment and financial decisions.

About Standard & Poor's Fixed Income Risk Management Services

Standard & Poor's Fixed Income Risk Management Services delivers a portfolio of products and services to investors that serve the global financial markets by providing market intelligence and analytic insight for risk driven investment analysis, including for the debt, structured finance, derivative, and credit markets.

Standard & Poor's Fixed Income Risk Management Services are performed separately from any other analytic activity of Standard & Poor's. The unit has no access to non-public information received by other units of Standard & Poor's. Standard & Poor's does not trade on its own account.

SOURCE Standard & Poor's