Understanding the creditworthiness of counterparties is a crucial element in business decision making. Investors need to know the likelihood that money invested in bonds or in the form of loans will be repaid. Corporations must quantify the creditworthiness of suppliers, clients, acquisition candidates and competitors.
The traditional measure of credit quality is a corporate rating, such as that produced by S&P, Moody's or Fitch. Yet, such ratings are available only for the largest firms, not for millions of smaller corporations. In order to quantify their credit worthiness, smaller companies are often analyzed using alternative methods, namely probability of default (PD) models. (To learn more, see A Brief History Of Credit Rating Agencies.)