Risk data repository of the year: Moody’s Analytics

Moody’s Analytics is named as risk data repository of the year for the improvements it has made to its pioneering DataHub platform: streamlining backend workflows, improving system response times and reducing the time needed to bring additional datasets onboard.

Data is a vital component of every financial organisation these days, but understanding how to make the best use of it can be a real challenge for senior executives.

DataHub was first launched in January 2021 as a way of helping financial and risk decision-makers explore and analyse a wide range of relevant information. It is constantly being refined to afford a better customer experience for users.

The platform offers a holistic view of risks and opportunities that relate to credit, real estate investments and climate. It also provides essential inputs for Know Your Customer (KYC) onboarding and compliance screening, master data management and entity resolution.

Moody’s Analytics offers DataHub as a value-added functionality to support customers all the way through the data process: from data evaluation (helping customers assess the data they need before they buy it) through to data management using cloud-based technology.

Start with the data

As a long-established provider of global risk intelligence, Moody’s Analytics has an advantage in being able to provide an extensive set of data for its customers to use.

This includes a wide variety of information across Moody’s Analytics’ businesses, covering all current and historical credit ratings, and market-implied ratings to allow early detection of any potential deterioration of creditworthiness and detailed data on default experiences throughout various economic cycles.

As Moody’s Analytics notes: “An optimal data experience starts with valuable data” – and on that the service really delivers.

The datasets provided cover more than 4.5 million active and historical ratings; default and recovery data going back to 1920 and covering more than 800,000 securities and 59,000 issuers; probabilities of default for more than 60,000 publicly traded firms; climate scores for more than 5,000 companies and 200 sovereign entities; and over 40 million loan and 30-year forecasts of more than 2,100 major macroeconomic variables.

Then move on to the analytics

But good data supply is only one half of the puzzle. The thing that helped Moody’s Analytics stand out from the crowd this year is what happens to the data afterwards.

Not only does the platform provide quick and easy access to Moody’s Analytics’ data, it also offers users access to a range of industry-standard tools to analyse and quickly isolate desired data points.

DataHub uses collaborative environments, which it terms ‘Spaces’, in order to bring people, tools, data and models together in a single place. This allows customers to tinker with the data to create the datasets they need, and from which they can derive the most value.

More experienced users – such as data scientists or advanced desktop users – have a range of more advanced tools they can draw upon. The service also works seamlessly across different desks and geographies, allowing even wider collaboration between users.

“Once a customer has selected the data they need, our Spaces functionality is where Moody’s DataHub stands apart from other platforms,” the company says.

Improving customer experience

Over the past 12 months, Moody’s Analytics has launched a new version of its DataHub platform in order to improve the user customer experience.

The most important addition to the platform is the introduction of new architecture that allows the streamlining of backend workflows, thereby improving system response times and making it easier to onboard new datasets.

The latest version also includes a new and improved user interface, which provides more descriptive details and easier navigation to find the relevant data that the customer is after.

New visualisation-building tools have also been added to DataHub in order to support users who wish to turn their data into powerful charts and dashboards.

Moody’s Analytics has also expanded its cloud capabilities, adding Microsoft Azure as the latest cloud storage endpoint, in addition to the existing support for Amazon Web Services S3 and Google Cloud Services.

The final improvement this year has been the launch of a number of new datasets on the platform, including expanded datasets on commercial real estate and default and recovery risk.

“We are continuing to work with our internal partners to increase our offering as several more data products are currently in process for release on the platform later this year,” says Moody’s Analytics.