Care Ratings scores early win in sovereign push as global peers vindicate its stance

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. When global rating agencies revised their sovereign debt ratings for France and Portugal earlier this year, aligning them with those of Care Ratings, they “vindicated" the stance of the Indian rating agency that launched its fledgling sovereign rating business just over a year ago, a top official at Care Ratings said.

Care Ratings assigned an A+ rating to Portugal in February and to France in September. Meanwhile, S&P Global Ratings raised its Portugal rating to A+ in August and lowered France to A+ in October.

The management of Care Ratings sees this as a win for the company’s new business and a solid start to its global ambitions. “This is a vindication of the robustness of our model and I give full credit to our team, which prepared for over three years before we launched our commercial operations," said Mehul Pandya, managing director and group chief executive officer, CareEdge Group (the group-level brand identity of the company).

“It takes a bit of courage to stand out because one of the criticisms of rating agencies is convergence bias – everybody gives the same rating, so if anything fails everybody is to be blamed equally," added Pandya, who was elevated to chief executive of India’s second-largest rating agency in 2022. He said the company’s global ratings are backed by experts who have worked on similar assignments elsewhere and that its ratings committee has external members from Europe, Africa, Australia and Singapore, among other places.

This, Pandya said, was meant to ensure that no home-country bias seeped in. Paul Coughlin, who chairs the ratings committee, spent 26 years at S&P, where he was the executive managing director and global head of the credit ratings group.