The LSE Directory / Alternative data
Moody's Corporation is a New York based financial services company built around two businesses: Moody's Ratings (formerly Moody's Investors Service), which issues credit ratings and opinions on bonds, loans and structured finance instruments for corporate, sovereign, sub sovereign and financial institution issuers, and Moody's (formerly Moody's Analytics), which sells economic data, company and credit risk datasets, catastrophe and climate risk models, compliance tools and research software. Moody's Ratings is registered as a Nationally Recognised Statistical Rating Organization (NRSRO) with the U.S. SEC and is one of the three dominant global rating agencies alongside S&P Global Ratings and Fitch Ratings. The company differs from pure data vendors by combining an issuer paid ratings business, where corporations and governments pay Moody's to rate their debt for investor distribution, with a separate subscription and software business selling to the banks, asset managers and insurers who consume those ratings. Its analytics arm has expanded well beyond credit scoring into catastrophe modelling and insurance risk software following the 2021 acquisition of Risk Management Solutions (RMS), and into private company and beneficial ownership data through Bureau van Dijk, giving it reach into insurance underwriting and KYC compliance workflows that pure rating agencies do not typically cover. Moody's traces its ratings business to 1909, when John Moody began publishing bond ratings, building on his 1900 Moody's Manual of Industrial and Miscellaneous Securities. The company was owned by Dun & Bradstreet from 1962 until it was spun off as an independent public company (NYSE: MCO) in 2000; Berkshire Hathaway has been a long standing large shareholder. As of year end 2025 Moody's reported 16,076 employees and revenue of 7.72 billion dollars; in Q1 2026 the Ratings segment posted record quarterly revenue of about 1.2 billion dollars on more than 2 trillion dollars of rated debt issuance. The company's role rating mortgage backed securities before the 2008 financial crisis led to a 2017 settlement of 863 million dollars with the U.S. Department of Justice and a group of states. Since December 2023, Moody's has pushed generative AI into its research workflow through Research Assistant, an AI search and analysis tool built on its internal Data Estate of company, credit and economic data, which the company describes as the fastest adopted product in its history, alongside newer GenAI tools such as an Early Warning System for commercial real estate portfolio monitoring.
