Winner: Credit Benchmark

Adoption of Credit Benchmark as a service provider has steadily grown among the SRT community in the last year, with nearing 40 major SRT participants now utilising Consensus Credit Ratings and Analytics to improve their transactional, decision-support and workflow productivity. The company fills a critical information gap by offering a timely, comprehensive and independent view of credit risk. These credit risk views, sourced from over 40 global banks, complement the information provided to investors by issuing banks, as well as from traditional credit rating agencies and third-party model vendors.

Mark Faulkner, co-founder of Credit Benchmark, says that greater data transparency will inevitably be a driver for growth in the SRT space in coming years. “While the SRT market has been steadily developing in the past two decades, regulatory headwinds have capped the growth trajectory of market,” he notes. “This is all changing now – sovereign wealth funds, pension funds and other new investors are entering the market. Access to data on the creditworthiness of hitherto unrated or private portfolios adds a level of reassurance that allows these entrants to confidently participate in the growth of the market.”

“I’m fond of the phrase ‘trust, but verify’,” Faulkner continues. “SRT is a relationship business – the investors have longstanding relationships of trust with their issuing partners.  Verifying the creditworthiness and acceptability of a portfolio and being able to communicate that information to internal and external stakeholders is incredibly helpful in getting deals done. Our data helps drive productivity – helping clients do more deals, at scale, more quickly.”

This rapid market expansion and Credit Benchmark’s role as a data provider to the industry came as somewhat of a surprise to the company itself, says Michael Crumpler, ceo of Credit Benchmark. “Since we launched in May 2015, we have continued to build our dataset and expand on the products and analytics we offer to credit risk professionals. We’ve seen broad adoption and demand for our products across many market segments, but if you had asked me a few years ago what our fastest growing segment would be in 2024, I certainly wouldn’t have guessed the SRT market.”

“It’s been a welcome surprise, and we’re now working closely with our SRT clients to make sure we are developing new analytics to fully meet their needs and to help this market expand as it should,” Crumpler continues.

The company has responded to this burgeoning uptake by investing heavily in its product and client success teams and by using technology like AI and machine learning to improve its product capabilities. One example is in the enhancement of its entity mapping service, which has been developed to leverage proprietary entity characteristics to identify and match at the exact legal entity level, utilising machine learning principals.

“Our clients have embraced our entity mapping capabilities to accurately identify and assess the credit risk in disclosed pools,” explains Faulkner. “The efficiency boost to due diligence is evident, and this added layer of credibility has seen our unique CB IDs being included in deal tapes to help speed up portfolio mapping and acceptance between trading parties.”

Credit Benchmark’s data has also proved valuable in the assessment of non-disclosed or blind pools, with Crumpler explaining: “Our geographic, industry and sector-level analytics offer valuable insights into the credit profile of a blind pool where no entity-level data is shared by the issuer. The fact that many of the issuing banks participating in SRT trades also contribute to our consensus dataset adds another level of credibility to the analysis we can provide.”  

When asked what 2025 holds for the SRT market and for Credit Benchmark, Faulkner speaks to the firm’s openness to listening to the industry and adapting accordingly. “Credit Benchmark is driven by technological innovation and client feedback, and we’re open to all good ideas,” he says. “As the market expands, adding more investors, more issuance, more geographic spread and more assets being financed, we wouldn’t be so hubristic as to think that is down to us. However, we’re dedicated to continuously expanding our capabilities to better support our clients and we hope that, in turn, we can play a small part in the growth of the market.”

Faulkner concludes: “It would be remiss of us not to thank every single one of our customers and prospects who we’ve learned from on our journey, and we wouldn’t be where we are without their engagement, curiosity and good nature, so I’d like to take this opportunity to say thank you.”

For the full list of winners and honourable mentions in this year’s SCI Capital Relief Trades Awards, click here.