Rating: modefinance the first italian agency to rate banks

As of today, an Italian ratings agency will be able to issue ratings on the international banking system.

modefinance, the first fintech firm to be registered as a ratings agency in Europe (July 2015), will start to produce credit ratings on all the commercial banks in the world, of which there are over 25,000 in more than 200 different countries.

Based in Trieste, modefinance is the first Italian ratings agency to be allowed to issue ratings on banks. The major ratings agencies don't usually rate banking systems, either internationally or domestically, and normally concentrate on corporates. "But in this historic period for international finance", said Valentino Pediroda and Mattia Ciprian, the founders of modeFinance "we have noticed a call for greater transparency and security, to protect investments and M&A deals that particularly involve small banks and finance firms. For our ratings, we use innovative, proprietary technology, 'MORE for Banks', that manages to simplify and summarize in a single element, the rating, the analysis of organisations that are as complex as banks. With this authorisation and our fintech technology we will grow our credit risk web application services further, to give a service that is extraordinarily useful for investment funds, for banks themselves when dealing with the inter-bank lending market, and for firms."

"Big data", conclude Pediroda and Ciprian "will allow the costs of business intelligence to be further reduced and will make credit ratings accessible even to smaller firms and make them available in sectors and in countries which are known as being less transparent or economically open. Thanks to big data, we can rate any company and bank in the world, even without a balance sheet. Today we can rate 200 million companies in over 200 countries worldwide."

To increase the transparency of the "MORE for Banks" method, and in accordance with the suggestions and best practice in the market, modefinance has created a section on its website (cra.modefinance.com) for market consultation by stakeholders (investment funds, investment management companies, financial brokers, banks themselves) so as to gather opinions, comments and possible advice.

modefinance was founded in 2009 because of an idea that big data could be applied to financial ratings. Using its own proprietary ratings methodology, MORE (Multi Objective Rating Evaluation), modeFinance can assess the credit risk of companies and banks, by combining balance sheet information with many other variables that can show the stability of the firm in question, such as organisational structure, principal market, home country and management experience. A complex data mining system is used to harvest and gather together this information, and so open-source data can be explored and managed.