Credit Rating Agencies Editing and Proofreading Services

A rating is a letter grade, and everything else the agency publishes exists to explain why that letter and not the one above or below it. That explanatory writing carries unusual weight: it moves spreads, it is quoted in prospectuses, it is read by the issuer's board as a verdict on management, and it is examined by regulators who care whether the methodology described was the methodology applied. An agency's credibility rests on whether its published reasoning is specific enough that an informed reader could have reached the same conclusion.

We edit what rating agencies and their analysts produce — rating action commentaries and press releases, full rating reports and credit opinions, methodology and criteria documents, sector outlooks and thematic research, peer comparison reports, rating committee memoranda and internal analytical notes, surveillance reports and periodic reviews, structured finance new issue reports and surveillance updates, criteria consultation papers and responses to market comment, presentations for issuers and investors, and regulatory disclosures and conflict of interest documentation. Our editors check that the drivers cited in the commentary are the drivers in the methodology, that the rating sensitivities are genuinely testable, and that hedged language does not obscure the analytical judgement being made.

Rating sensitivities are the most-read and most-poorly-written section in the sector. Investors and issuers both go straight to them, looking for the conditions under which the rating changes, and they routinely find something unusable: "the rating could be downgraded if credit metrics deteriorate materially" or "if the operating environment weakens". We rewrite these so each sensitivity names the metric, the threshold and the period over which it must be sustained — leverage above 4.5× for more than four consecutive quarters, or interest cover below 2.0× at any test date — and so upgrade and downgrade conditions are stated with the same specificity, since asymmetry there is noticed immediately. Where a qualitative factor genuinely drives the rating, we make it observable: not "weakening governance" but the specific events that would evidence it. Sensitivities written this way are also what protect the agency when a rating action later surprises the market.

Everything you send is treated in strict confidence, including pre-publication commentaries, committee material and issuer information under agreement. We are editors rather than credit analysts, and we offer no view on any rating or methodology — the analytical content remains entirely yours. What we can do is make the reasoning legible, consistent across a large publication programme, and precise where precision is the whole point.