RiskTech100® Winner’s Profile: Moody's

Celebrating the success of Moody’s integrated risk strategy

The evolution of Moody’s strategy is echoed in the firm’s increasingly successful RiskTech100 performance.

Nick Reed, Chief Product Officer, believes that winning the Strategy award three years ago was a key indicator of the company’s growth potential: “As we honed in on the idea of building a comprehensive and integrated view of risk, we saw our performance began to ignite,” he says. “Across sectors and segments, the value of thinking about risk independently and individually was reducing over time. The key components are understanding the interaction between and across risks and, ultimately, the impact that is having on business. This is what customers are really seeking, and we are uniquely positioned to help them navigate the evolving and interconnecting risk landscape,” he explains.

“Our positioning as a global integrated risk assessment business is deliberate and unique, and this strategy has resonated strongly with the market and our customers. We are exceptionally proud of Chartis’ recognition of our strategy,” Reed continues.

The strength of Moody’s combined capabilities enables the firm to deliver a unique, multi-dimensional and holistic perspective of risk. “Our unrivaled data assets enable us to produce analytic insights that can be immediately injected into workflows and decision-making. This combination really sets Moody’s apart,” says Reed.

Performance driven by the quality of solutions

Reed is quick to underscore the importance of Moody’s strong performance across numerous award categories. “Being recognized as the overall winner is attributable to our strategic focus on integrated risk. The fact that we ranked \#1 across 15 individual solution categories demonstrates the breadth and quality of our products and solutions,” he says.

Reed cites the insurance award as an example. The acquisition of RMS in 2021 significantly enhanced Moody’s position in the insurance industry, expanding and deepening its climate and catastrophe risk modeling and analytics capabilities. “We have successfully integrated robust RMS data and models into new products, accelerating the development of our global integrated risk capabilities and addressing the next generation of risk and opportunity assessment,” he says.

Embedding the power of Orbis

Over the last 12 months, Moody’s has focused on embedding Orbis, its market-leading, comprehensive entity database into its solutions. Orbis provides information on over 450 million entities and over 1.7 billion ownership links worldwide and can be used for entity verification, corporate structure investigation, screening and in-depth research.

“Orbis contains fundamental elements that we believe are necessary for almost any workflow or decision-making process,” explains Reed. “Through identity verification, we can accurately attach and connect disparate attributes to entities, such as industry, location, physical presence and commercial real estate valuations and risks.”

It is these connection points and the increasing interoperability of Moody’s suite of solutions that Reed is keen to highlight. “Historically, the industry has built hyper-specific point solutions, whereas developments like Orbis allow us to connect solutions together, allowing our customers to step between applications. Using Orbis’ connective tissue customers can understand other types of risk within the same workflow. Over the next couple of years, we will continue to develop capabilities that allow customers to navigate seamlessly around different risk types,” he says.

Future focus: early warning systems and correlated insight

In a world of volatility and rapid change, firms are dealing with more interrelated and complex risks than ever before. “There is increasing pressure for customers to be able to quickly draw conclusions and increase their understanding of the risks they face,” says Reed. “The time horizon to identify that interface is shrinking. Our customers want to know what might be relevant and how it might be relevant as quickly as possible, to ascertain where they should focus more or less attention. And that’s what we can provide them.”

Over the next 12-24 months, a big focus for Moody’s will be developing early warning systems that drive such efficiencies for customers. “Our early indicators and warning systems will provide rapid insight into potential legal or regulatory breaches, offering an immediate compliance layer. It will also help our clients to be more efficient, identifying the no-go zones or areas of no concern, and providing specific insight into the risks that they might want to expend a little more effort in exploring. We will be embedding this 360-degree view of risk into our solutions and workflows in the coming year,” Reed expands.

Moody’s strategy is also continuing to adapt and evolve to encompass the idea of correlated risk and insight. “In the modeling and analytics work that we are undertaking, we believe there is a correlation between risks. That in itself is highly insightful for our customers. Our future strategy will focus on building products and solutions that deliver this correlated insight that arises from our unique, integrated understanding of risk”, Reed concludes.