Standard & Poor's Launches Investor Analytics Initiative

Fixed Income Risk Management Services to Provide Data, Advanced Risk and
Counterparty Analytics, and Valuation Services

NEW YORK, Oct. 23 /PRNewswire/ -- Standard & Poor's, the leading provider of
financial market intelligence, has announced the launch of its Fixed Income
Risk Management Services (FIRMS) business to deliver solutions that help
investors perform greater due diligence on the financial instruments in their
portfolios. The move combines several previously separate business and
product lines under a unified mandate to provide enhanced analytics and
greater context around asset pricing and the inter-related linkages between
counterparties and obligors.

"For both investors and regulators, transparency has come to mean not just
more data, but also greater analytics and insight around the financial
instruments in exceedingly complex portfolios," said Lou Eccleston, Executive
Managing Director, Fixed Income Risk Management Services, Standard & Poor's.
"The mission of FIRMS is to bring greater commercial analytics capabilities to
the marketplace, not just in response to market demand, but also to support
the many methodological and transparency enhancements we've been making on a
company-wide basis to advance the understanding and use of credit research."

The establishment of Standard & Poor's Fixed Income Risk Management Services
is another example of Standard & Poor's commitment to providing analytic
transparency and independent and objective analysis of asset-backed
securities, corporate credits and credit derivatives. Among the many
capabilities FIRMS' provides global investors and markets are:

-- Qualitative and quantitative market research and commentary made
available by an independent internal research group focused on helping
investors better understand the cross-market and cross-asset class
valuations and relationships in complex structured products. Its
Market
Intellect research reports use Standard & Poor's proprietary,
third party and new models and analytics to improve investor-level
transparency.
-- Credit ratings information, data distribution and insight delivered to
credit professionals through RatingsDirect, Standard & Poor's
premier credit analysis portal, and through real-time technologies and
publications including RatingXpress, RatingsIQuery and CreditWeek.
-- Real-time coverage of the leveraged loan primary and secondary markets
providing large leveraged loan underwriters and investors with an
analytically robust database and research reports including flagship
"Standard & Poor's LCD News".
-- Company cross-tagging of global identifiers, reference data,
counterparties and securities to identify global linkages enabling
granular risk management.
-- Credit risk models and solutions designed to enhance clients'
internal credit rating systems and provide tools for their credit
portfolio analysis, including the analysis of probability of default,
loss given default, and exposure at default.
-- Structured finance models, analytics and solutions offering underlying
data, quantitative models and advisory services to the structured
finance community, including ABSXchange, an internet portal providing
investors with structured finance deal performance data, portfolio
monitoring and surveillance, cash-flow analysis, and reporting.
-- Independent securities evaluations for cash fixed income and
structured
finance instruments offering, through Standard & Poor's
Securities Evaluations, independent price evaluations of almost three
million hard-to-price fixed-income and structured securities daily,
and
extensive fixed income reference data.

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

Michael Privitera, Standard & Poor's Communications, +1-212-438-6679,
Michael_Privitera@standardandpoors.com