PrefBlog

Standard & Poor’s has announced:

it reviewed its ratings on 37 global asset managers by applying its new ratings criteria for the sector (see “Key Credit Factors For Asset Managers,” published Dec. 9, 2014). As a result, we have taken rating actions on these entities (see ratings list). We also took rating actions on certain subsidiaries as a result of applying our new criteria to their parents. The rating actions were driven by revisions to our criteria rather than a sudden change of the issuers’ creditworthiness.

We define asset managers as companies that derive a majority of their revenues from management and performance fees for managing third-party money or assets on the behalf of retail or institutional investors. We rate asset managers under a similar framework to our corporate criteria. Our assessment reflects these companies’ business risk profiles, their financial risk profiles, and other factors that may modify the stand-alone credit profile.

We have now removed the under criteria observation (UCO) identifier from our ratings on all of the entities listed below.

We anticipate publishing, for most issuer credit ratings or outlooks that change, research updates within 30 business days. We anticipate publishing research updates in the first or second quarters of 2015 for those entities that we did not change our issuer credit ratings or outlooks on under the new criteria.
…
IGM Financial Inc.
Issuer Credit Rating A/Stable/A-1 A+/Stable/A-1
Senior Unsecured A A+
Preferred Stock BBB+ A-
P-2(High) P-1(Low)

The criteria have been published and discussed by S&P. We can look forward to publication of the specific reasons for the IGM downgrade.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 12th, 2014 at 7:09 pm 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.