Moody's Buys Valuation Company

Moody's Corp. today announced that it has acquired BQuotes, a provider of price discovery tools and end-of-day pricing services for a wide range of fixed income securities. The acquisition enhances Moody's product offering in the fixed-income valuations and pricing arena, augmenting the firm's efforts to deliver tools that facilitate price transparency in global fixed income markets, especially for complex structured securities and derivative instruments.

BQuotes' product line will be integrated into Moody's Analytics' suite of pricing and valuation products, which include model-based fair value estimates, evaluated pricing, and observed pricing.

"There is growing market demand for tools that enable credit market participants to better value debt securities," said Gus Harris, senior managing director of Moody's New Products Group. "BQuotes will provide both our evaluators and our customers with critical information on a wide range of fixed income securities, and we believe this will be an important source of competitive differentiation for Moody's."

Ray McDaniel, CEO of Moody's, described the acquisition as a “response to market demand for alternative independent sources of fixed income valuation."

The acquisition of BQuotes extends Moody's product suite and positions the company to offer a complete range of fixed income valuation services. Late last year, Moody's introduced model-based valuations for structured securities through Credit Values DCV, a discounted cashflow valuation service that provides an independent assessment of the intrinsic value of such securities.

The company's recent acquisition of Mergent's corporate and municipal bond pricing services expanded Moody's pricing initiative to evaluated pricing, while BQuotes further broadens Moody's offering to price discovery tools and observed pricing services.