The LSE Directory / Credit rating agencies
Scope Ratings GmbH is a credit rating agency headquartered at Lennestrasse 5 in Berlin, with additional offices in Frankfurt, London, Paris, Madrid, Milan and Oslo. It issues credit ratings, that is, independent opinions on the creditworthiness of a borrower or debt instrument, across sovereign and public sector entities, financial institutions, corporates, structured finance (auto, consumer and SME ABS, RMBS, CMBS and CLOs), covered bonds, and infrastructure and project finance, for institutional investors and issuers of debt instruments. It is the rating arm of the wider Scope Group, which also runs separate fund-rating, ESG-analysis and investor-services businesses under the Scope brand. Scope's stated positioning is to serve as a European counterpart to the three US-headquartered agencies that dominate the market, Moody's, S&P Global and Fitch. According to reporting citing its own disclosures, it rates around 750 issuers and more than 13,500 bonds, together representing more than EUR 43 trillion of debt, giving it, per trade press coverage, the second largest coverage of European sovereign and public sector issuers and the third largest of European corporates among rating agencies. A structural differentiator versus competitors is its ownership: Scope is held through the partnership Scope SE & Co. KGaA, with the nonprofit Scope Foundation holding a stake in the general partner alongside roughly 70 to 80 other shareholders (a mix of insurers, other institutional investors and individuals), a structure the group presents as designed to keep the agency independent of a single controlling owner. Scope Group was founded in Berlin in 2002 by Florian Schoeller, initially as a firm analysing alternative investments, before expanding into credit ratings. The ratings business has been registered as a credit rating agency with the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) since 24 May 2011, originally under the name PSR Rating before being renamed Scope Ratings in January 2012; it is also registered with the UK Financial Conduct Authority and Switzerland's FINMA. Scope Group grew the ratings franchise through acquisitions, including FERI EuroRating Services AG in 2016 and Euler Hermes Rating GmbH in 2021. On 2 November 2023 the European Central Bank's Governing Council accepted Scope Ratings as a new external credit assessment institution (ECAI) within the Eurosystem Credit Assessment Framework (ECAF), the fifth rating agency accepted into that framework alongside Moody's, S&P, Fitch and DBRS Morningstar, and reported by trade press as the first European headquartered agency to reach that status. Technical onboarding, including Scope's asset backed securities ratings, was completed by the ECB in December 2024, after which Scope's own newsroom described it as the only European rating agency whose ratings are used directly by the ECB and euro area national central banks in monetary policy operations.
