Scope Ratings won approval from the European Central Bank to join the select club of companies whose credit assessments it accepts in its collateral framework.
Analysis by the Berlin-based organization will now be eligible along with four longstanding rivals: DBRS Morningstar, Fitch Ratings, Moody’s Investors Service and S&P Global, according to a statement released Friday.
“This decision follows a thorough Eurosystem assessment of the application submitted by Scope Ratings,” the ECB said. The “go-live” of its assessments for monetary-policy purposes will be announced at a later stage.
The change, which follows years of study and deliberation by the ECB and its constituent central banks, will be a transformative step for Scope, whose profile had risen in advance of the decision. Norges Bank signed off on accepting its ratings last year, while Sweden’s Riksbank opted to use them for corporate bonds in 2020.
The integration of Scope into the ECB’s IT infrastructure will take several months. The ratings for asset-backed securities don’t comply with its requirements, so they’re not eligible for monetary-policy purposes “for the time being,” the central bank said.
Scope was founded in 2011, aiming to offer “credit research and assessments from a distinctly European perspective” and “an alternative view to the North American rating agencies,” according to its website.
“We thank the ECB for their trust and confidence in accepting Scope as the first European rating agency in the Eurosystem Credit Assessment Framework,” Scope Chief Executive Officer Florian Schoeller said in a statement. “I am convinced that Europe needs strong domestic capital market infrastructure to support its independence and sovereignty.”
European countries face heightened scrutiny of their credit ratings at present, with the debt legacy of the pandemic along with mounting pensions liabilities bringing public finances into greater focus. France was downgraded in April by Fitch, while Italy remains at risk of a junk assessment at Moody’s.
Greece’s rating was raised to investment grade last month by S&P Global Ratings in the first such move by one of the three big assessors since the country’s debt crisis more than a decade ago.
The use of such companies’ research in collateral is normally a mundane aspect of the ECB’s financial plumbing, though it took on greater prominence during the sovereign debt crisis of the past decade as market turbulence threw a spotlight on their diverging and sometimes eccentric views.
In 2011, turmoil-stricken Ireland was still treated as being in the same risk category as Germany within the euro-zone framework because that was DBRS’s assessment at the time.
(Updates with comment from Scope CEO in seventh paragraph.)
