Standard & Poor's (S&P) is an American financial intelligence company and a division of S&P Global, operating as a global institution that provides financial market analysis. The company is a market leader in providing credit ratings for companies and countries, and in creating benchmark indices. The origin of S&P traces back to 1860 when Henry Varnum Poor published a book on the operational and financial state of U.S. railroad companies, commercializing standardized market information. The current entity, Standard & Poor's, was officially formed in 1941 through the merger of Poor's Publishing and the Standard Statistics Bureau, which was established in 1906 to provide information on non-railroad companies. This merger solved the problem of fragmented financial data by combining two mature lines of business into a single source.
S&P works primarily through two mechanisms: issuing credit ratings and establishing financial market indices. The S&P Global Ratings division assesses the creditworthiness of debt obligations for corporations, governments, and debt instruments. Its long-term credit rating scale ranges from AAA (highest quality) to D (in payment default), with intermediate ratings like BBB+ or BBB-. A higher rating indicates a lower risk of default, which affects an entity's borrowing costs. The company also creates indices, most famously the S&P 500, which was launched in 1957 and tracks the stock performance of 500 leading U.S. companies, serving as a key indicator of the U.S. stock market's health.
S&P connects to the broader global financial ecosystem as one of the "Big Three" credit-rating agencies, alongside Moody's Ratings and Fitch Ratings. The company was acquired by The McGraw Companies in 1966, which later rebranded as S&P Global in 2016. The parent company, S&P Global, expanded further through a merger with IHS Markit in 2022. The core function of providing independent credit ratings and market benchmarks has remained the same, but the corporate structure has changed, with the name S&P now often referring to the larger S&P Global group, which includes Global Ratings and Dow Jones Indices.