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Credit Research

Strengthen your fixed income investment teams and expand your portfolio with expert-led credit research

Credit Research at a glance: 

  • Expertise on-demand brings years of experience to your teams, with expert analyst support for your credit research, credit rating and modelling needs.
  • Detailed research across sectors and fixed income asset classes, including investment grade, high yield, distressed, private debt, sovereign, US municipal and emerging markets.
  • Advanced reporting including fully-customised reports and model formats – instantly accessible through an intuitive online portal.
  • State of the art modelling techniques and technology to help extract and analyse large datasets. 
  • Comprehensive analysis support covering areas including commercial lending, money market instruments and debt capital markets.
  • End-to-end engagement from screening and initial research analysis, to events tracking and coverage monitoring.  

Support your investment teams with advanced research and modelling

Navigating fixed income investments is always a challenge. Expanding portfolios and moving into new markets and sectors can be especially difficult when so much time is spent on existing coverage through modelling, researching and writing investment research.

To ensure the right investment decisions are made at the right time, today’s teams need to:

  • Develop a complete view of issuers with timely research compiled from multiple, diverse data sources.

  • Ensure informed investment strategies using the latest quantitative modelling techniques to identify the most attractive opportunities.

  • Stay up-to-date with ongoing developments through monitoring of earnings analysis, industry trends and events, financial strategies and more.

  • Accelerate and automate time-consuming processes and spend more valuable face-time with clients and investors. 

Scale and strengthen your teams with a fully-customised credit research solution

Our Credit Research solution is fully customised to integrate with your in-house research processes and standards. Backed by years of experience and the latest automation, technology and analytics tools, our experts can help you grow your portfolio, track risk and strengthen coverage – freeing up time for you to spend with clients and investors. With Credit Research from The Smart Cube, you get:

  • Deep analysis and cash flow modelling
    Deep analysis and cash flow modelling

    Leverage independent credit rating and custom credit reviews on every issuer, with comprehensive analysis on key financials, cash flows, earnings, liquidity, debt maturity, debt structures, covenants, spreads movement and more.

  • Bespoke reports
    Bespoke reports

    Gain detailed comprehensive analysis with in-depth reports customised to meet your investment decision needs. 

  • ESG research
    ESG research

    Integrate environmental, social and governance factors into your research to aid more informed decision-making and better investments. 

  • Always-on intelligence
    Always-on intelligence

    Stay in the know with regularly updated reporting, from earnings analysis to episodical developments and market movements. 

  • Expertise across diverse asset classes
    Expertise across diverse asset classes

    Access an experienced team of credit analysts with specialist knowledge that spans assets classes and analysis needs.

How your business benefits

With Credit Research from The Smart Cube, you can:

  • Ensure modelling quality using highly qualified and experienced analysts with specialisms in financial research, modelling and advanced analytics.
  • Elevate your insights and strengthen research with alternative data sources, from consumer behaviour on social media to supply chain risk and commodity price volatility, as relevant.
  • Scale at will with the flexibility to add and reduce coverage whenever it’s needed based on peaks and troughs in demand.
  • Work faster with the latest technologies and tools for expediting processes, and dedicated experts that can help improve research workflows.
  • Reduce the costs of growth with instant access to highly experienced analysts and data sets, ready to go as and when you need them.
  • Stay current with up to date coverage on investment grade issuers available at any time through a digital credit research portal.

How we work with you

Whether you want instant access to investment grade research, or bespoke issuer research conducted on your behalf, we can offer a truly customised solution designed to meet your exact requirements.

Step 1

We work with you to make sure we understand your overall requirements, from the insights you need to strategies you currently have in place.

Step 2

Liaising with your team, we get to know your research processes and identify the areas where we can help.

Step 3

We then set up the required infrastructure for you to meet your needs, with the right combination of analyst expertise and cutting-edge technology.

Step 4

A proof of concept is deployed, helping you to realise the value of our solution and enabling us to make improvements along the way.

Step 5

This process of improvement continues as we collect feedback, and identify new opportunities and additional value we can deliver.

Why choose The Smart Cube?

When you choose Credit Research from The Smart Cube, you always get:

A stable partnership: With over 17 years’ experience in delivering high-value customer research, we are perfectly placed to provide the stability and expertise your credit research projects need. 


Deep credit experience and expertise: We have credit experience of over 4,000 issuers with insights that span multiple diverse sectors, geographies and ratings categories.


More than just a service partner: We take pride in our emphasis on engagement and service quality. When you work with us, we become a true extension of your team – in whatever way adds the most value. 


The best tools for the job: We have the data sources, analytics tools and cutting-edge AI and machine learning technologies to help you gain more value, more quickly. 


Diverse asset class expertise: The Smart Cube’s dedicated financial experts provide comprehensive coverage across asset classes.


Credit Research in action

Credit research dashboard helps top 10 private equity firm track high yield portfolio

  • THE CHALLENGE

    This US-based investment manager wanted independent investment recommendations and the ability to track business and financial developments across its high-yield portfolio.

  • OUR APPROACH

    We created a comprehensive digital dashboard that delivered investment recommendations on both a fundamental and relative basis, including expected up/downgrades in ratings and the subsequent impacts in credit spreads.

  • VALUE DELIVERED

    The Smart Cube leveraged best in class technology tools to achieve 30% efficiency gain per analysis. The issuer analysis was also supported with credit models, operating trends analysis, competitive and industry landscape and cash flow analysis as well as enabling active management and tracking of credit ratings.

Leading investment firm turns to The Smart Cube to augment financial analyst capacity

  • THE CHALLENGE

    The client’s loan monitoring division needed help to monitor new and existing loans through its proprietary tool.

  • OUR APPROACH

    The Smart Cube developed a new workflow in line with the client’s specific needs and deployed a team of financial analysts to ramp up capacity to handle the increased volume of daily spreads, which grew from an initial count of 24 to 100.

  • VALUE DELIVERED

    Our work improved the throughput of the loan monitoring team in accordance with the firm’s internal policy and best industry practices, ensuting high quality standardised output across the firm.