Morningstar Credit Analytics Cuts Through Private Market Opacity with Standardized Corporate Credit Analytics
Morningstar Credit Analytics, a wholly owned subsidiary of Morningstar, Inc. (NASDAQ:MORN), today launched Corporate Credit Analytics, a new set of tools designed to bring greater transparency and consistency to private credit analysis.
"Private credit decisions are still shaped by incomplete and inconsistent information. That distortion makes it harder to compare risk and defend decisions," said Brian Grow, president of Morningstar Credit Analytics. "Corporate Credit Analytics replaces public-market comparisons with aggregated private‑company data. Credit teams can now have a common, data-driven, and defensible framework to help evaluate and benchmark borrower performance, from initial underwriting and portfolio surveillance through investment committee and fund investor reporting."
According to PitchBook's 2025 Annual Global Private Debt Report, private credit has grown to more than $2.5 trillion in assets, yet it remains structurally opaque. As reliance on issuer‑specific assumptions grows, institutional investors and regulators have raised concerns about how risk is measured, compared, and communicated.
A Standardized Framework for Private Credit Analysis
Corporate Credit Analytics is built to address a growing challenge in private credit analysis: fragmented, non-comparable data, a gap the Financial Stability Board identified in its 2026 private credit report. The platform brings three tools together designed to create consistent, comparable credit analysis:
- Data Explorer surfaces aggregates of real company financial statements and loan-level data sourced from private company disclosures, rather than public comparables. The data set includes approximately 80 metrics spanning financial statements, debt schedules, covenant thresholds, credit estimates, and key credit ratios including EBITDA to interest expense, debt to EBITDA, cash flow to debt, leverage, and liquidity.
- Data Overview provides configurable visualizations of trends, ratio distributions, and key performance metrics across private credit rating categories and industries, supporting portfolio insights and effective communication with investment committees and stakeholders.
- The Credit Estimate Tool generates ratings-aligned credit risk scores for private and limited-disclosure borrowers using methodologies consistent with Morningstar DBRS frameworks. Outputs are mapped to familiar rating categories and benchmarked against aggregated segment statistics by industry, region, and credit quality.
"With real financials, loan-level information, and credit estimate scoring in one place, users can now evaluate risk at a level that hasn't been possible before," Grow said.
Built for Institutional Credit Market Participants
Corporate Credit Analytics is designed for institutional users across the private credit ecosystem, including direct lenders, portfolio managers, CLO managers and structurers, bank credit teams, debt capital markets professionals, and ratings advisory functions. Use cases span underwriting, portfolio construction, fund investor communications, securitization, rating agency engagement, and ongoing surveillance—intended to help credit teams move faster and maintain consistency across investment committees, fund investors, and regulators. Users can access data and insights through the Morningstar Credit Analytics platform or via APIs, with upcoming Model Context Protocol (MCP)-enabled connectivity for AI-driven and agentic workflows.
About Morningstar, Inc.
Morningstar, Inc. is a leading provider of independent investment insights in North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia. The Company offers an extensive line of products and services for individual investors, financial advisors, asset managers and owners, retirement plan providers and sponsors, institutional investors in the debt and private capital markets, and alliances and redistributors. Morningstar provides data and research insights on a wide range of investment offerings, including managed investment products, publicly listed companies, private capital markets, debt securities, and real-time global market data. Morningstar also offers investment management services through its investment advisory subsidiaries, with approximately $370 billion in assets under management and advisement (AUMA) as of March 31, 2026. The Company operates through wholly-owned subsidiaries in 32 countries. For more information, visit www.morningstar.com/company.
About Morningstar Credit
Morningstar Credit provides credit ratings, research, data, and analytics solutions that support transparency in global credit markets. Morningstar Credit includes Morningstar DBRS and Morningstar Credit Analytics. For more information, visit credit.morningstar.com.
Caution Concerning Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements as that term is used in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are based on our current expectations about future events or future financial performance. Forward-looking statements by their nature address matters that are, to different degrees, uncertain, and often contain words such as " consider," "future," "maintain," "may," "expect," "potential," "anticipate," "believe," "continue," "will," "intend", "aim" or the negative thereof, and similar expressions. These statements involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties that may cause the events we discuss not to occur or to differ significantly from what we expect. For us, these risks and uncertainties include, among other things, failing to innovate our product and service offerings or anticipate our clients' changing needs. A more complete description of these risks and uncertainties can be found in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), including our most recent Report on Form 10-K. If any of these risks and uncertainties materialize, our actual future results and other future events may vary significantly from what we expect. We do not undertake to update our forward-looking statements as a result of new information or future events or otherwise, except as may be required by law. You are, however, advised to review any further disclosures we make on related subjects, and about new or additional risks, uncertainties and assumptions in our filings with the SEC on Forms 10-K, 10-Q and 8-K.
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Media Contact: Stephanie Lerdall, +1 312 696-6037, Newsroom@morningstar.com