The LSE Directory / Credit rating agencies
Rating and Investment Information, Inc. (R&I) is a Tokyo based credit rating agency that assigns and publishes credit ratings on Japanese corporations, banks and insurers, government and municipal debt, structured finance instruments, and a number of sovereign issuers outside Japan. It was formed in April 1998 through the merger of Nippon Investors Service and the Japan Bond Research Institute, a Nikkei affiliated ratings house, and today rates roughly 700 Japanese entities, which it describes as the broadest issuer coverage of any credit rating agency active in the Japanese market. R&I's core business is Japanese credit risk: issuer and issue ratings on corporate bonds, bank and insurer regulatory capital instruments, asset backed securities and other structured products. Its main domestic rival is Japan Credit Rating Agency, Ltd. (JCR), founded in 1985; between the two, R&I is generally regarded as holding the larger share of the Japanese ratings market, and academic research on the sector has noted that both local agencies tend to rate domestic issuers higher, on average, than international agencies such as Moody's and S&P assign to the same names. Beyond core credit ratings, R&I has built out a sustainable finance line, issuing second party opinions on green, social, sustainability, sustainability linked and transition finance frameworks against ICMA principles such as the Green Bond Principles, and it holds Approved External Review Provider status under the Climate Bonds Standard. R&I is majority owned by Nikkei, Inc., the Japanese media group that publishes the Nikkei newspaper and calculates the Nikkei 225 index; Nikkei holds a 58.6 percent stake, and R&I sits within Nikkei's data services group alongside QUICK Corp. and Nikkei Research. It is registered as a credit rating agency with Japan's Financial Services Agency under Article 66-27 of the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act, a registration it has held since September 2010, and it was designated a Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organization by the US Securities and Exchange Commission in May 2007. R&I's ratings work extends beyond Japan: in September 2025 it upgraded India's sovereign rating to BBB+ from BBB with a stable outlook, citing the country's macroeconomic fundamentals and fiscal management, one of three sovereign upgrades India received from different agencies that year. Through mid-2026 it has continued routine methodology work, including revised approaches to banks' and insurers' regulatory capital instruments, alongside its regular flow of corporate issuer rating actions.
