S&P Global Ratings is a global credit rating agency (CRA), which is an institution that provides opinions on credit risk. It is a division of S&P Global Inc. and is considered the largest of the Big Three credit-rating agencies, alongside Moody's Ratings and Fitch Ratings. The institution's roots trace back to 1860, when Henry Varnum Poor published a comprehensive financial analysis of U.S. railroad companies, solving the problem of fragmented information for investors. The modern entity, Standard & Poor's Corp., was officially formed in 1941 through the merger of Poor's Publishing and the Standard Statistics Bureau.
The core mechanism involves issuing credit ratings for the debt of corporations, governments, and other entities. These ratings are a forward-looking opinion on an obligor's capacity and willingness to meet its financial commitments in full and on time. The long-term rating scale ranges from AAA, which signifies an extremely strong capacity, down to D, which indicates payment default. Intermediate ratings, such as BBB+ or BBB−, are also used to denote varying levels of creditworthiness.
As a global entity, S&P Global Ratings connects to the Indian financial ecosystem through its parent company's relationship with CRISIL, a major Indian credit rating agency. A significant recent change was the company's rebranding to S&P Global in 2016. A notable historical action was the lowering of the U.S. long-term sovereign credit rating from AAA to AA+ on August 5, 2011.