News and information group Reuters has launched an Internet-based credit information service providing aggregated and tailored information on issuers in the international credit markets.
The launch of the service marks one of the company’s first e-business initiatives since Reuters published its Internet strategy earlier this year. The vendor describes the new resource as the first step in a comprehensive Web programme for the fixed income markets.
The Reuters Credit service offers subscribers specialised news, credit benchmark data, lists of securities and loans with their terms, balance sheets and ratings information for each of the borrowers. The service also covers the world’s top 11,400 publicly rated issuers of debt, plus a further 15,000 unrated loan obligors. It is being pitched at a number of diverse groups of financial professionals including fixed income sales, asset managers, issuers, analysts, researchers and the loans community. The subscription-based service will cost US$550 per month per password.
Alan Cubbon, head of JP Morgan’s global credit and government indices, and who took part in an early trial of the product, comments: "When we first started trying to assemble an index of fixed income credit markets, we would have killed for something like this."
Reuters is populating the service with content sourced from a variety of partners, including: RiskMetrics, which provide a range of credit, spreads, transition matrices and recovery rates; JP Morgan, which provides credit spreads and indices; and Fitch IBCA, which provides ratings, research and statistics on issuers. The Loan Pricing Corporation (a Reuters Group Company) provides loan pricing, deal data and news. The site was developed and built by Multex.com