About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

S&P’s FIRMS Business Joins Valuations Vendor Community with Structured Asset Portfolios Service

Subscribe to our newsletter

As another example of Lou Ecclestone’s revamp of the Standard & Poor’s offering as part of its recently launched Fixed Income Risk Management Services (FIRMS) business, the vendor has added a new valuations service for structured assets and complex securities. The Valuation Scenario Services for Structured Asset Portfolios pits S&P against the competition in the already rather crowded valuations market.

According to Ecclestone, who was appointed executive managing director of FIRMS at the start of last year, the service is aimed at providing a much clearer picture of the real value of the paper financial institutions are holding in order for them to more accurately analyse their portfolios. “Market uncertainty, a lack of liquidity and an overall crisis sentiment are combining to create a disrupted relationship between market observed pricing and the intrinsic value of structured assets on investors’ balance sheets,” he says.

Accordingly, the service offers a range of analytics that aims to give investors greater context around asset pricing and the detailed relationships between counterparties and obligors. FIRMS indicates it is currently working with an unspecified number of central banks, investors, regulatory and industry bodies to help them value these complex and illiquid securities.

The vendor claims that the analytics provided by the service offer investors a step by step, transparent assessment of their structured portfolios under a range of different assumptions and economic scenarios. This information is then reviewed in a collaborative decision support process with clients to help drive an improved understanding of structured credit portfolio value.

Standard & Poor’s Valuation Scenario Services operates independently from the company’s ratings business and it is supported by the newly formed Market, Credit and Risk Strategies (MCRS) team. MCRS has been created as an independent research group that analyses cross market and cross asset class valuations and relationships. The valuations service is also supported by the Standard & Poor’s Structured Finance Platform and modelling team and the Fixed Income Architects team.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Upcoming Webinar: Are you making the most of the business-critical structured data stored in your mainframes?

17 June 2025 10:00am ET | 3:00pm London | 4:00pm CET Duration: 50 Minutes Fewer than 30% of companies think that they can fully tap into their mainframe data even though complete, accurate and real-time data is key to business decision-making, compliance, modernisation and innovation. For many in financial markets, integrating data across the enterprise...

BLOG

Accelex Says its AI Agent Can Tame The ‘Nastiest’ Corner of Data Management

Unstructured data is the bugbear of private market data managers, but one of the latest entrant to the space claims to have a solution that can tame the “nastiest” part of data retrieval – private market fund quarterly reports. Accelex is a London-based artificial intelligence (AI) focussed FinTech that has launched a platform that can prise market-relevant...

EVENT

TradingTech Summit MENA

The inaugural TradingTech Summit MENA takes place in November and examines the latest changes and innovations in trading technology and explores how technology is being deployed to create an edge in sell side and buy side capital markets financial institutions in the region.

GUIDE

AI in Capital Markets: Practical Insight for a Transforming Industry – Free Handbook

AI is no longer on the horizon – it’s embedded in the infrastructure of modern capital markets. But separating real impact from inflated promises requires a grounded, practical understanding. The AI in Capital Markets Handbook 2025 provides exactly that. Designed for data-driven professionals across the trade life-cycle, compliance, infrastructure, and strategy, this handbook goes beyond...