At a time of severe market volatility and unprecedented business disruption, corporates are borrowing extensively to weather the situation. Ratings become of ever greater importance, and yet, loss of business income by many, means perfectly healthy firms, in normal times, are now rather less so.
This joint ACT and Fitch Ratings webinar explored how Fitch Ratings had adapted to the COVID-19 crisis, both with respect to the uncertainty and the pace of developments.
• The assumptions Fitch Ratings were using in rating cases
• How they translated rating cases into actions
• Whether any of the criteria had changed or been amended
• How they viewed liquidity during the crisis.
And was followed by Q&As.
Richard Hunter is the global head of Fitch’s corporate rating practice, which covers industrials, utilities and real estate companies. Fitch's corporate group rates over $10 trillion in bond and bank debt, built on the opinions of 400 dedicated corporate analysts, based in 28 cities around the world.
Fitch’s corporate group covers all aspects of the rating and surveillance of upwards of 2,000 non-financial corporations across the globe, as well as publishing timely commentary on different sector trends, scenario analyses for industries and individual companies, issuer forecasts, commodity price decks, and loan and bond performance across regions.
Previously, Richard served at Fitch as the Regional Credit Officer responsible for Europe and Asia, after heading the agency’s global power practice in New York. Most recently, Richard ran Fitch’s international corporate and utility rating practice for Europe and Asia.
Richard holds an MA from Lincoln College, Oxford, and, before joining Fitch in 1996, he worked in credit roles in Frankfurt and London at the central liquidity institution for the German cooperative financial system. He is currently based in London.
Naresh has spent 30 years in a variety of treasury roles spanning industry and advisory firms. At PwC he was the UK Lead for Cash Management and Payments and helped lead the firm’s work on payments, Brexit, treasury controls, Blockchain, operational resilience and target operating model design and implementation. He won an Innovation award for his proposition around mobile payments. He is an Associate Member of the ACT. Prior to PwC, Naresh spent almost 20 years in industry across a range of organisations including BP, Heron Property, Cable and Wireless and Fujitsu taking on roles such as analyst, dealer and treasurer.
ACT Webinar: Rating reviews during a time of business interruption took place on Tuesday 21 April 2020 at 12:30 BST
