Contact person
Keith Gilmour
Managing Director, Head of SF and PF Ratings SalesScope Ratings GmbH
Sebastian Dietzsch
Director Stuctured FinanceScope Ratings GmbH
Sebastian Dietzsch holds a Master’s degree in Business Administration from the Technische Universität Berlin, a Master of Science degree in Finance from Lunds Universitet, Sweden and is a certified Financial Risk Manager (Global Association of Risk Professionals, GARP).
About Scope Ratings
Scope Ratings is the leading European credit rating agency, offering its clients an opinion-driven, forward-looking and non-mechanistic credit risk analysis, thus contributing to greater diversity of opinions for institutional investors.
As an ESMA-accredited rating agency, Scope Ratings provides ratings of financial institutions, corporates, structured finance, covered bonds, project finance and public finance. It is the only European credit rating agency accepted by the European Central Bank (ECB) in its Eurosystem credit assessment framework (ECAF).
Scope Ratings is part of the Scope Group, with headquarters in Berlin and offices in Frankfurt, London, Paris, Madrid, Milan and Oslo.
Structured Finance & Covered Bonds
Scope offers a European alternative to the established US credit rating agencies by applying rating methodologies that are designed to reflect Europe’s distinct particularities. Our structured finance and covered bond ratings capture the underlying factors that explain why transactions in Europe exhibit a markedly better credit performance than those in the US.
Scope's key analytical difference lies in its customised approach and regional perspective. Scope favours opinion-driven analysis, as opposed to merely applying rigid global criteria and industrialised rating approaches.
Our approach to structured finance and covered bond ratings results in high credit differentiation because:
- Our methodology offers rating stability by adjusting assumptions for long-term local references and strong forward-looking fundamental views.
- We apply a bottom-up analytical approach that considers transactions in their individual context. Scope can therefore analyse a transaction without bias; for instance without mechanistic caps or one-size-fits-all assumptions.
- We use a post-crisis counterparty risk approach that reflects the more robust credit quality of European banks after the implementation of the Bank Recovery and Resolution Directive (BRRD).
Scope currently rates and monitors issuances of over EUR 380 bn of European structured finance debt securities and approx. EUR 500bn of covered bonds – with rating coverage continuing to increase rapidly. Rated transactions include covered bonds, SME and Auto ABS, CMBS, RMBS as well as the securitisations of leases, trade receivables and alternative investment funds. Scope also analyses a number of European infrastructure and project finance transactions.
