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Moody's is a New York based financial services company organised around two businesses under one parent, Moody's Corporation (NYSE: MCO). Moody's Ratings (renamed from Moody's Investors Service in March 2024) assigns credit ratings to corporate, sovereign, municipal, financial institution and structured finance debt, the letter grade scales investors use to price default risk. The other business, branded simply Moody's since that same March 2024 rebrand (it was previously called Moody's Analytics), sells company reference data, credit and risk models, economic data, and compliance and lending software to banks, insurers, corporations and public sector bodies. Both businesses trace back to John Moody's letter grade ratings of railroad bonds, first published in 1909. Within its category, Moody's differentiates on the depth of private company data behind its Orbis platform, brought in through the 2017 acquisition of Bureau van Dijk for about 3.3 billion dollars, which aggregates firmographic, financial, ownership and M&A information on more than 625 million companies from over 170 data sources, including 1.9 billion recorded ownership links, used for KYC and anti money laundering screening, supplier and counterparty due diligence, and credit decisioning. Its RMS unit, acquired in 2021 for about 2 billion dollars, supplies catastrophe and climate risk models used by property and casualty insurers and reinsurers across more than 120 countries. Customers are overwhelmingly institutional rather than retail; revenue on the data side comes from subscriptions and software licenses, while the ratings side is paid by debt issuers, a business model it shares with rivals S&P Global and Fitch. Moody's Ratings is one of the "Big Three" credit rating agencies alongside S&P Global and Fitch, and has been registered with the U.S. SEC as a Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organization in all five ratings categories since 1975. Moody's Corporation reported full year 2025 revenue of 7.7 billion dollars, up 9 percent year over year, split about 4.1 billion dollars from Moody's Ratings and 3.6 billion dollars from the Moody's data and analytics segment, with roughly 16,000 employees across more than 40 countries. The company is an S&P 500 constituent, and Berkshire Hathaway has held a large stake in the stock since 2010, most recently disclosed at 24.6 million shares. Rob Fauber has been chief executive since January 2021. The 2024 rebrand folded a decade of acquisitions, including Orbis and RMS, under the single Moody's name, positioning the non ratings business as one integrated risk data and software provider rather than a set of separately branded tools; Moody's Ratings continues to operate and publish under its own name as a legally separate credit rating business.
