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For Immediate Release
Moody’s KMV Unveils First South African Specific Credit Risk Assessment Product at Successful Johannesburg Event
NEW YORK, July 14, 2005 - Moody’s KMV today unveiled Moody's KMV RiskCalc® 3.1 South Africa at a well-attended event at the Park Hyatt in Johannesburg where Moody’s KMV, Moody’s Investors Service and Rand Merchant Bank representatives made presentations discussing the importance of the product and its uses. Approximately 115 guests from regulatory bodies, banks, insurers, corporations and investment managers attended. RiskCalc is the industry’s first credit risk tool focused wholly on measuring the creditworthiness of South African private unlisted companies. Moody’s KMV formally announced the new product on July 11, 2005.
Andrew Huddart, President of Moody's KMV, said: “RiskCalc South Africa is the first South African specific model for evaluating private firm credit risk. The model was developed, validated and calibrated using the largest clean database of unlisted South African firm defaults available combined with Moody's KMV expertise in building default predictive models. RiskCalc South Africa allows lenders, structurers, investors and corporations to evaluate private firm credit risk more precisely, frequently and easily.”
Reynold Leegerstee, General Manager of Moody’s Investors Service South Africa, commented: “Moody’s KMV RiskCalc 3.1 South Africa is a powerful tool providing enhanced insight into private company performance. The support received from market participants while building the model, and the interest shown by them during the official launch today, evidences the continuous further sophistication of the South African bank and debt capital markets. Given that RiskCalc is employed as a tool to support structured CDO transactions in overseas markets, we can expect demand for a similar application in the South African structured finance market.”
Rautie Nel, Head of Wholesale Credit Risk Measurement, Rand Merchant Bank, stated: “Default probabilities are a key input into our core business - loan origination, pricing, reserving, limit setting, performance measurement and economic capital calculation and allocation. By using RiskCalc South Africa, local banks can now have more comfort that the measurement of credit risk in terms of default probabilities for private firms are more accurate on a portfolio basis, as adjusted versions of international models were previously used for this purpose.”
Moody’s KMV, a wholly owned subsidiary of Moody's Corporation, is the world’s leading provider of quantitative credit risk solutions to lenders, investors, and corporations. Moody’s KMV's tools provide current default probabilities, recovery estimates, valuations and correlations, and are widely used to assess portfolio risk/return. Moody’s KMV Serves over 2,000 clients in 80 countries, including most of the world's 100 largest financial institutions. The company maintains the largest database of corporate defaults in the world. In addition to its San Francisco headquarters, Moody’s KMV has offices around the world to serve its global customer base.
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