The LSE Directory / Credit rating agencies
S&P Global Ratings is a credit rating agency and a division of S&P Global Inc. (NYSE: SPGI), the New York based data and benchmarks group formerly known as McGraw Hill Financial. It publishes opinion based credit ratings, on a letter grade scale running from 'AAA' down to 'D' for default, on sovereign governments, corporations, financial institutions, US public finance issuers and structured finance instruments such as mortgage backed and asset backed securities. Ratings, together with supporting credit research, industry outlooks and default statistics, are distributed to subscribers through the RatingsDirect desktop service and the newer Ratings360 platform. The firm is widely described as the largest of the so called Big Three credit rating agencies, alongside Moody's Ratings and Fitch Ratings, a group that industry analyses have estimated together controls the large majority of the global ratings market. Its customers split into two groups: bond and loan issuers, who commission and pay for a rating so the debt can be marketed to institutional investors, and buy side investors, banks and risk managers who subscribe to the underlying research, benchmarking data and default studies. Coverage is organized around dedicated sector groups, sovereign and international public finance, financial institutions, corporates, structured finance and infrastructure, and its scale, more than one million ratings outstanding, is the yardstick smaller and newer entrants in the sector are measured against. The business traces its roots to 1860, when Henry Varnum Poor published History of Railroads and Canals in the United States, a compendium of financial and operating data on American railroads. Poor's Publishing merged with Standard Statistics Bureau in 1941 to form Standard & Poor's Corporation, which McGraw-Hill acquired in 1966; the parent group rebranded from McGraw Hill Financial to S&P Global in 2016. As of its most recent annual regulatory filing (year end 2024), S&P Global Ratings employed 1,725 credit analysts including supervisors, maintained a direct presence in 28 countries with sector coverage extending to 128 countries, and had more than one million ratings outstanding. It is registered as a Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organization with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, and its UK subsidiary, S&P Global Ratings UK Limited, is registered as a credit rating agency with the Financial Conduct Authority. In 2015, Standard & Poor's paid $1.375 billion, split evenly between the US Department of Justice and a group of 19 states plus the District of Columbia, to settle claims that it had inflated ratings on mortgage backed securities and collateralized debt obligations before the 2008 financial crisis; it was, at the time, the largest penalty a rating agency had paid, and the firm did not admit wrongdoing. In its Global Credit Outlook 2026 report, published December 3, 2025, S&P Global Ratings forecast global economic growth of 3.2% for 2026 and projected the US trailing twelve month speculative grade corporate default rate would ease to around 4% by September 2026, while cautioning that performance would diverge sharply by sector and geography against an unsettled tariff and geopolitical backdrop.
