Moody’s Analytics Invests in Data Management to Transform Risk Profile Offering

In 2019, Moody’s Analytics acquired one of the largest providers of private financial statement data in the world. Today the company owns a wealth of data from 400 million firms with over 20 years of credit history. Its mission is to use the data to provide a probability of default score or rating for each firm. This enables its clients to incorporate the ratings in their own workflows and risk evaluation systems. This empowers them to make better investment decisions.

Moody’s Analytics already had a traditional data platform in play that was performing daily batch processes to score and produce the data on a regular basis. However, the company soon realised that to gain a competitive advantage and deliver improved offerings to its clients, it needed to do more with its data. This was point when the company turned to Rackspace Technology®.  

Moody’s Analytics was looking for a partner who could jump right in, understand its goals and the technology it was dealing with, and be able to execute and create a solution from scratch.

The Rackspace Elastic Engineering for Data team worked collaboratively with Moody’s Analytics to understand its key data sources quickly, its challenges, and the opportunities to extract further actionable insights and metrics from the database.

To extract the insights and metrics, Rackspace Technology designed a cloud native solution with ETL processes using AWS EMR, AWS Glue and Apache Hudi. Migrating to AWS meant that Moody’s Analytics could benefit from an array of cloud native services that allowed the company to categorise each of the 400 million firms and define their probability of default daily — all within a matter of four hours. This is the scalability Moody’s Analytics required to empower its clients to choose best-in-class entities and portfolios to partner with and invest in.

“What Rackspace Technology enabled us to do is enrich the data we already have and provide additional analytics on top of it,” stated Louis Chapman, Senior Director of Product Operations at Moody’s Analytics. “That makes it extremely useful for our clients to understand.”

The migration also allowed Moody’s Analytics to soft launch an amplified version of its existing backend analytics system, called the Peer Aggregation Engine.