CTO Priorities | #RatingsProud Series 3

CTO Priorities | #RatingsProud Series 3

Series 3 - Week of June 7, 2021

The next several CTO Priorities will be shared through the lens of the Ratings Technology Leadership Team (inspired by Instagram Takeover ). Our goal over the next few series is to highlight some of the key initiatives that we’ve partnered and executed against to transform Ratings not only for our external customers, but for all our Ratings employees. #RatingsProud

Series 1: Technology Strategy & Supporting Users through Working 100% Virtually

Series 2: Our Ratings Analytic Platform (RAP) Journey (posted only internally)

Series 3: S&P.com Regulatory Redesign & Ratings360

“Collaboration” and “Partnership” are common buzz words that many of us hear frequently. No matter what level you’re at, at some point, you have been encouraged to share ideas, work together/join forces for the common good of the organization and/or project as it’s factual that we typically accomplish more and attain greater results when we partner.

Within S&P Global Ratings, we all share the common goal of improving our external customer experience through service excellence. The regulatory redesign of the S&P.com website and Ratings360 strategic initiatives are examples of successful partnerships that continue to improve our external users’ experience while continuing to transform our technology and data capabilities. Bruce Schachne from our Ratings Commercial team shared similar sentiments in his recent internal blog that celebrates the successful regulatory website redesign and integration.

S&P.com/Regulatory Redesign

The redesign went live on April 9 and included the integration of the regulatory website into www.spglobal.com/ratings. After the redesign, all marketing and disclosure content is now on one site, offering a streamlined and comprehensive digital workflow that increases S&P Global and S&P Global Ratings’ brand equity, while generating awareness and demand for our products and services.

To allow for this seamless integration, a project team was created comprised of various functional groups within S&P Global, including Legal, Marketing, Compliance, Control, Ratings Release Governance, among others. One of the key challenges faced by the team was mitigation of important regulatory risk while addressing stakeholder requests and providing a unified customer experience. The project team worked with the regional offices to ensure that local regulations were adhered to and that local business requirements and preferences were met. They also worked with regional content teams to ensure that all parts of the website were properly localized. Additionally, to ensure that the website was launched with the utmost quality, the team performed numerous tests, including application functionality, regression, usability, security, performance, cross-browser and mobile responsiveness testing, etc.

The redesign of the site also returned capacity to our technology team members. By removing dependencies on technology teams, teams can now release content independently in real-time, without releases being scheduled. Going forward, this solution will reclaim capacity for Ratings Technology that is equivalent to one month of scrum team work annually. Due to the enhanced streamlined experience, we now have 220k+ active monthly users to our website and 1.2M+ page views per month.

Ratings360

We’re also extremely proud of the various partnerships across S&P Global that enabled the successful launch of Ratings360 – which provides rated issuers with a holistic picture of their organization’s credit story – ratings, risk research and critical insights on one personalized dashboard. We have 18k+ registered users across ~7k+ organizations.

Ratings360 also provides value internally through the Ratings Request feature that allows Corporate Issuers to input issuance details, schedule meetings with analysts, etc. Several analytical leaders within S&P Global Ratings (Chris Lee, Michael Seewald, Eduardo Uribe and Andrew Watt) promoted these features and displayed their appreciation through an internal blog on the Hub.

Accomplishments over the last few months include:

• Onboarding New Assets Classes. Collateralized Loan Obligations (CLOs), International Public Finance/Sovereigns, and Auto Asset Backed Securities (ABS).
• Launch of a New Sustainable Finance Section. Incudes Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) subscores and SAM Corporate Sustainability Assessment (CSA) scores.
• Integration of Ratings360 Ratings Requests Within Salesforce. Reduction in friction and improved client response times.
• Commitment to Global Clients. Accelerated platform performance for China where performance was below expectations.
• Market Insights Reports. Available now on the platform.
• Access to S&P Global Media. Videos and podcasts available on the platform; users can set new content alerts.
• Access To Quarterly Financials. For Corporate Issuers.
• Implementation of Google Analytics. Improved understanding of user behavior.

Recognition

In May 2021, John Berisford recognized the Regulatory Website Redesign and Integration team for operational excellence, execution, while demonstrating integrity and transparency. Both the S&P Global Regulatory Redesign and Ratings360 project teams continue to collaborate, take ownership to resolve impediments with minimal to no guidance. Every challenge has been tackled as an opportunity for improvement. This is just another example of the caliber of talent that we have within S&P Global and how partnerships are yielding tangible results for our customers and users. Thank you to all the project team members for your continued focus on quality execution and collaboration! #RatingsProud

- Ratings Technology Leadership Team

If you have technology transformation journeys you would like to share, please comment on this article or share links to other business cases. We are always looking for good material we can learn from and leverage that will accelerate our progress.