A credit-rating firm explains why their approach beats traditional agencies: they don't take payment from companies they rate, cover far more firms, and update ratings quarterly instead of letting them sit for years. Microsoft's last S&P rating was from 2009.
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To start, our data is proven to be better, so our credit ratings are based on that better and reliable data. We're unconflicted. We don't get paid to give credit ratings to companies. That's typically how it's done elsewhere. Our ratings are free of those conflicts. They're unbiased, they're independent. We have significantly more coverage, and that's only going to get more significant as we add more companies under coverage. So every single company that we add to coverage will get a credit rating as long as they have debt for now. Whereas S&P Global, Moody's, they're pretty limited in terms of their scope of their credit ratings. And really importantly also, we update ours every single quarter. So every single time that the company gets a new financial statement, a new quarterly document or an annual, we'll update our credit ratings. That is not something that you see with traditional credit providers. In order to get a new credit rating on a company, the company has to approach, say, S&P Global or Moody's seeking to get more debt themselves, and then the credit rating agencies will give them a new credit rating. So that leads to a lot of situations where a company's credit rating is very stale. So in our system, we noticed that something like, say, Microsoft, the last time they got a credit rating in our system at the time was back in 2009. And we were using that credit rating in 2020. So thankfully with Microsoft, they're still a great company and they got a great rating back then. So it didn't matter, but the possibility that our data was that stale was really alarming to us. That's something that we provide as well as more frequent updating.
Anybody who's a consumer of other credit research knows that it does not get updated very often at all. I know some of our partners on the self-directed channel, Schwab, TD, Interactive Brokers, E-Trade, those folks, they were frequently very interested in our research for no other reason than the fact that what little they could get was updated very intermittently, if not at all, for months, quarters, years. It's a big deal that we update it as often as we do.
