Moody's Analytics
Moody's Analytics — the name under which Moody's non-ratings business operated from 2007 until a rebranding that presented it simply as Moody's from 2024 — is the financial intelligence arm of Moody's Corporation, supplying credit research, economic data, risk software and market analysis used across the British and international news media. Its London operation has long been based at One Canada Square, Canary Wharf, at the centre of the capital's wholesale banking district, and Moody's has announced a relocation of its London headquarters to 10 Gresham Street in the City of London in 2026, as its lease at One Canada Square expires. In a directory of agencies, Moody's Analytics belongs alongside the other industrial suppliers of financial news inputs: it does not rate bonds — that is the separate work of Moody's Investors Service — but it produces the economic forecasts, default studies, credit models and risk analysis that banks, investors, governments and journalists use to interpret the rated world.
Created in 2007 by separating ratings from everything else
Moody's Analytics was formed as a subsidiary of Moody's Corporation in 2007, when the company split into two operating divisions: Moody's Investors Service, the rating agency, and Moody's Analytics, containing all of its other products. The new division was created in August 2007 for the combined non-ratings businesses, to operate separately from the ratings business. That separation is the single most important fact for anyone citing its output. Moody's Corporation's reported figures for the business in recent profiles — revenue of $3.6 billion and about 10,600 employees, headquartered at 7 World Trade Center in New York City — describe a company of the same order of size as many listed data groups, built to sell research, data, software, consulting, training and professional services rather than credit opinions. Its separation from the rating agency also has a regulatory logic: the models and advisory services it sells to banks must be visibly distinct from the independent ratings its sister company assigns to those same institutions' debt.
Built by acquisition: KMV and expected default frequency
The division began operations with businesses Moody's had already bought. In 2002 Moody's Corporation acquired KMV, a San Francisco-based provider of quantitative credit risk management tools whose flagship solution was EDF, Expected Default Frequency, a measure of the probability that a company will default. KMV — formerly Kealhofer, McQuown and Vasicek, after its founders — had pioneered the use of share price information to estimate default risk, and in 2003 its integrated modelling software debuted in a credit risk management system called Credit Monitor. This quantitative tradition distinguishes Moody's Analytics within financial information: much of its reputation rests not on written commentary but on models that produce a number — a default probability, a loss estimate, a stress-test result — which clients embed in their own lending and investment systems. When newspapers report studies of corporate default risk or comparisons of credit quality across sectors, Moody's KMV-derived measures are among the sources most likely to underlie the figures.
Economy.com and economic forecasting
In 2005 Moody's added Economy.com, based in West Chester, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia, with offices in London, Prague and Sydney. The acquisition brought economic, financial, country and industry research and data services, and with them the forecasting operation that made Moody's Analytics a quoted voice in economic news. Its economic research publications provide in-depth analysis of the global economy, including the United States and its states and metropolitan areas, European countries and their subnational areas, Asia and the Americas. The team tracks and forecasts economic growth and covers labour markets, housing, consumer spending and credit, output and income, mortgage activity, demographics, central bank behaviour and prices, while also providing real-time monitoring of macroeconomic indicators and rapid analysis of monetary policy and sovereign risk. Its clients for this work include multinational corporations, governments, central banks, financial regulators, retailers, mutual funds, financial institutions, utilities, real estate firms, insurers and professional investors. The London office of this forecasting operation is one reason British coverage of European economies so often carries a Moody's Analytics attribution distinct from any rating action.
Wall Street Analytics, Fermat and structured finance software
In December 2006 the firm acquired Wall Street Analytics, a San Francisco-based developer of structured finance analysis and monitoring software founded by Ron Unz, which became Moody's Wall Street Analytics. The deal added software for collateralised debt obligations, including the CDOnet valuation tool, and strengthened capabilities in mortgage-backed and asset-backed securities analytics. In 2008 Moody's Analytics acquired Fermat International, a Brussels-based provider of software for financial risk and performance management in banking, used at the time by more than 100 banks across 30 countries in Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Together with later enterprise risk offerings organised around research and data, risk management software and professional services, these acquisitions show the pattern of the business: wherever banks were obliged to measure a risk — credit, structured products, balance-sheet and regulatory risk — Moody's Analytics assembled a software and data product to sell back to them. That installed base in European banking, serviced substantially from London, is a large part of the London office's reason for existing.
Training, qualifications and the Surrey connection
A less visible but distinctly British component arrived in December 2008, when Moody's Analytics added Enb Consulting Ltd, a provider of professional training and career services in the financial sector based in Surrey, England, to its training services. Enb's programmes covered technical and soft-skills training for banking and capital markets professionals. Alongside it, the division has included the Institute of Risk Standards and Qualifications and CSI Global Education Inc, the Canadian Securities Institute's education business. Education matters to the profile of the company because it completes its position in the professional information chain: the same group that supplies a bank's risk models can also train and certify the staff who use them, and its published research benefits from proximity to practitioners. Moody's Analytics has also been recognised in industry awards for sales and customer service, a reminder that, unlike the rating agency, it competes openly as a commercial vendor and is judged by clients as one.
Knowledge Services: the London-headquartered research operation
One part of the wider business illustrates both the London connection and the group's willingness to sell operations that no longer fit. Moody's Analytics Knowledge Services was established in 2014 through the merger of two Moody's subsidiaries, Copal Partners and Amba Research, to provide bespoke research, analytics and automation technology to the financial services sector. It was headquartered in London and operated across nine delivery centres worldwide, employing subject-matter specialists who worked as an extension of clients' own teams for a client base of more than 250 banks, asset managers and consulting firms, in fields including investment banking, investment research, private equity, consulting and commercial lending. Equistone Partners Europe, a European mid-market private equity investor, subsequently agreed to acquire Knowledge Services from Moody's Corporation, backing its existing management to grow it as an independent business. The episode is worth recording because it shows the boundary of the Moody's Analytics described in this profile shifting over time: research outsourcing of this kind began inside the group and continued outside it, while the core data, software and forecasting businesses remained.
The London base: Canary Wharf to the City
Moody's London presence has been anchored at One Canada Square, Canary Wharf, London E14 5FA, the address recorded for Moody's Analytics UK Limited — a private limited company incorporated on 26 March 1999 — and for related UK companies including Moody's Analytics Knowledge Services (UK) Limited, incorporated on 14 November 2002 and previously named, in reverse order, Copal Amba (UK) Limited, Copal Partners (UK) Limited, Copal Partners Limited and Copal Research Limited. In March 2024 it was reported that Moody's would relocate its London headquarters from Canary Wharf to 10 Gresham Street in the City in 2026, coinciding with the expiry of its One Canada Square lease, taking space likely to be nearly a third smaller than its Docklands base, with a company spokesperson confirming the selection of the new location subject to closing. The move, reported alongside departures by other large financial tenants, places the London operation in the historic financial district for its next phase. For directory purposes the practical details are stable: a large London office, serving European clients, inside a New York-headquartered group.
What it sells, and to whom
Descriptions of the business consistently list the same components: credit analysis, economic research, financial risk management software and advisory services, assembled into research, data, software and professional services intended to deliver a seamless customer experience for capital markets and risk management professionals. Later summaries of its lines of business distinguish research, data and analytics; enterprise risk solutions in software; and professional services, including research and analytics services and training and certification programmes. Thousands of organisations worldwide use the company as a supplier, and its own materials stress quality, client service and integrity as its basis for retaining them. The buyers are the institutions that also dominate financial news as subjects — banks, asset managers, insurers, corporates, governments and regulators — which is precisely why the analysis the company publishes, from used-vehicle demand studies to sovereign risk monitoring, reaches the press so readily: its paying audience and the news audience for economic intelligence substantially overlap.
Distinguishing Moody's Analytics from Moody's ratings
The most common error in reporting about this group is attribution, and a directory entry should address it directly. Moody's Investors Service issues credit ratings; Moody's Analytics, now presented under the Moody's name for non-ratings activities, expressly publishes research that does not reflect the opinions of the rating agency. A forecast that a economy will slow, a model-implied default probability for a company, or an estimate of losses under a stress scenario is an Analytics product, however similar its branding to a rating announcement. Conversely, the research, training and software described here draw commercial strength from the shared name and from more than a century of Moody's presence in credit markets. Held apart and read together, the two businesses explain the group's unusual position in financial information: one half pronounces on creditworthiness, the other sells the tools with which everyone else measures it.
Position today
From its formal creation in 2007, Moody's Analytics grew from a collection of acquisitions — KMV's default models, Economy.com's forecasts, Wall Street Analytics' structured finance software, Fermat's banking systems, British training expertise and a string of later additions, including the Bureau van Dijk company-information business that contributed significantly to growth reported in 2018 — into a business recorded with $3.6 billion in revenue and more than ten thousand employees. Its London office, moving from One Canada Square to Gresham Street, remains its principal European hub for economic research, credit risk data and banking software. For users of this directory, it should be cited as what it is: a primary source of economic and credit analysis for the media, distinct from, but inseparable in name from, the rating agency with which it shares a parent.
