Credit Rating Export
The NICE Credit Information Service began to release government credit rating evaluation data in 2011, covering eight countries including Brazil, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, and India. It is one of the Korean credit rating firms that started large-scale overseas business that year.
The Korean firms are now regarded as providers of a new, Asia-oriented perspective in these countries, which were assessed only with the yardstick of Western credit rating agencies such as Moody’s, Fitch, and S&P. The countries had been increasingly discontent with their criteria through the foreign exchange and financial crises of the late 1990s and the early 2000s.
These days, the Korean government is providing full support for such firms’ businesses in Southeast Asia. This region is enjoying very rapid growth in retail finance nowadays, but the development of credit information infrastructure is still at its early stage.
The Financial Services Commission announced on June 4 that its Chairman Shin Je-yoon visited the Ministry of Finance and Revenue of Myanmar and agreed with it to export Korea’s corporate credit bureaus (CB) and corporate credit rating systems (CCRS). According to the agreement, Korea will send policy advisers to the ministry so that the systems can settle well in the region, too.
The CB can be defined as a credit information service for the integrated management and processing of enterprise credit data scattered across financial institutions, public organizations, and major corporations. The CCRS is used to rate companies according to their credit rating data.
In the meantime, the Korean firms are paying much attention to China’s and Russia’s plans to establish their own credit rating agencies and the possible impact of their penetration of the Southeast Asian markets. The new firms are expected to make inroads into the other BRIC countries as well as those in Asia.