PrefBlog

Standard & Poor’s has announced:

•We are raising the ratings on DundeeWealth Inc., including the long-term counterparty credit rating to ‘A’ from ‘BBB-‘, and removing the ratings
from CreditWatch positive where they had been placed following Scotiabank’s Nov. 22, 2010, acquisition announcement.

The upgrade reflects our view the company is “strategically important” to Scotiabank and its wealth management operations and thus benefits from the implied support from being associated with a higher rated entity; we applied three notches of support to the stand-alone rating for being strategically important.

The stable outlook reflects our expectation that DundeeWealth will maintain or improve its position in the Canadian wealth management sector.

This is a rather stunning 4-notch upgrade on the Preferred scale, to P-2(high) from P-3, and from BB to BBB+ on the global scale.

DBRS continues to rate the issue Pfd-3 (Review-Positive).

DW.PR.A was last mentioned on PrefBlog when the acquisition by Scotia was announced. DW.PR.A is tracked by HIMIPref™ but is relegated to the Scraps index on (rather dubious) credit concerns.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 27th, 2011 at 12:13 am and is filed under Issue Comments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.