The company that pools the private credit views of the world's largest banks - and hands the market back a single, independent consensus.
Every bank in the world keeps a private opinion about who might not pay it back. It is generated daily, refined by teams of analysts, and - until recently - almost never shared. Credit Benchmark was built on a single, contrarian question: what would happen if you pooled those opinions together?
The answer is a company that, since 2012, has quietly assembled one of the more unusual datasets in finance. Rather than employing its own analysts to hand out letter grades, Credit Benchmark collects the internal risk estimates that more than 40 of the world's largest financial institutions already produce. It aggregates them, strips out anything that could identify a contributor, and publishes the result as a Credit Consensus Rating.
The mechanism matters. No single bank's view is visible in the output; roughly 20,000 credit analysts effectively vote on each name, and the consensus is the sum. That design solves a problem the industry had lived with for decades - valuable data existed everywhere, but competitive and regulatory walls kept it locked in silos.
The scale that results is the headline. Credit Benchmark rates more than 110,000 corporates, financial institutions, funds and sovereigns across 160 countries. Around nine in ten of those entities carry no rating at all from S&P, Moody's or Fitch. For a risk manager staring at a private company or a mid-market fund, that gap is the difference between an informed decision and a guess.
The founders had run this play before. Donal Smith and Mark Faulkner previously built Data Explorers, which applied the same pooled-data logic to securities lending. Credit risk was the larger, harder frontier - and the one they set out to map.
Credit Benchmark enables us to say yes faster and potentially get bigger deals approved.- Senior Credit Risk Manager, Large Global Bank
Not agency-rated. Not built on one vendor's model. Credit Benchmark's ratings are consensus - drawn from the institutions that actually lend the money. That independence is structural: no borrower pays to be rated, so the signal comes from lenders, not from the companies seeking credit.
Banks and credit risk teams, central counterparty clearing houses, corporate treasuries, asset managers, fund financiers, insurers and securities-finance desks. They use the data for portfolio monitoring, counterparty checks, regulatory benchmarking and capital decisions.
Traditional agencies were built for a few thousand public bond issuers. Markets outgrew that model, leaving vast stretches of the economy unrated. Credit Benchmark fills the blind spots - and refreshes its consensus twice a month, surfacing quiet moves before they become headlines.
Better data does more than block bad deals. Broader coverage and timely updates let risk teams approve good business with confidence - the reason clients frame the value not as caution, but as speed and scale of decision-making.
Credit Benchmark does not try to out-analyze the rating agencies at their own game. It changes the game - swapping a single authoritative opinion for the pooled judgment of the market's most informed participants.
A B2B data-as-a-service business. Contributing banks share their internal risk estimates and, in return, gain access to the pooled dataset; additional institutions subscribe for coverage. The same consensus is licensed directly and through third-party platforms - meeting risk teams inside the tools they already use rather than asking them to adopt a new one.
Donal Smith and Mark Faulkner, ex-Data Explorers, set out to pool banks' internal credit views.
Index Ventures backs the build-out of the collection and consensus platform.
Consensus data begins releasing in May; Balderton Capital leads a $20M round.
Balderton, Index, Communitas and private investors including Michael Sherwood.
Consensus data lands inside the market's most-used terminals.
Model-benchmarking analytics built with Oliver Wyman.
Joins the World Economic Forum's innovation community.
Credit Benchmark sits alongside - and often inside - the incumbents of credit intelligence: S&P Global, Moody's and Fitch on the ratings side; Moody's Analytics, S&P Market Intelligence and Bloomberg's DRSK on the model side.
Its wedge is coverage and independence. Where agencies rate a curated slice of public issuers, Credit Benchmark reaches the private companies, funds and sovereigns that make up most of the real economy - and it does so with a signal sourced from lenders rather than issuers.
A new, different view of credit risk - neither agency-rated nor single-model-based.- Credit Benchmark
The expertise is as much in trust engineering as in analytics. Persuading 40-plus competing institutions to contribute their most sensitive numbers, then proving mathematically that no contributor can be reverse-engineered from the output, is the hard part - and the moat. Its recognition by the World Economic Forum's Global Innovators community in 2022 nods to that.
Founders: Donal Smith (Co-Founder & Chairman) · Mark Faulkner (Co-Founder). Team: ~71 employees across London and New York.
The product is, in effect, valuable "data exhaust" - the byproduct of risk models banks already run - turned into a standalone dataset.
Roughly 9 in 10 entities Credit Benchmark rates carry no public rating from S&P, Moody's or Fitch.
No borrower ever pays to be rated. The signal comes entirely from the lenders on the other side of the deal.
About 20,000 credit analysts contribute to every consensus - without any one of them being individually identifiable.