In the rating process, the Slovak Rating Agency puts emphasis on working with topical data that are provided either by the company/issuer or that are available to the Agency from other information sources Agency believes are reliable. má agentúra vysoko spoľahlivých informačných The rating process is run under co-participation and co-operation by the management of the company/issuer (an exception consists in assessment a rating processed without any co-operation of the assessed company which is run based on publicly available information on the entity assessed). Important principle is strict preserving secrecy on all confidential information vanieand data about client, which the Agency learns within its work.
Even though the rating has validity for a year's period, the rating may be modified and re-evaluated during that time. Necessity to re-evaluate the rating may occur in case when new facts have arisen and occurred or in case of an alteration in relevant information, facts and realities that have been considered in the process of awarding a rating. New events may occur not only within internal processes in the company/issuer, but also on the level of the industry or that of the macro-economic environment. Then the result of monitoring the awarded rating assessment is its decreasing, increasing, or preserving of its initial level
Awarding a rating is a result of rating process that is depicted in the following diagram.
Preparatory process starts by defining a requirement on the client's side. The client should define what kind of rating is expected. As a primary aim and goal of the Slovak Rating Agency is to define an independent and unbiased opinion on the company /issuer, it is discussed and judged in the so-called Acceptance Committee after having defined the requirement by the client.
Task of the Acceptance committee is to investigate, whether the Slovak Rating Agency cannot get into a conflict of interests within the process of assessing a rating for a particular entity, project, issue, which could put under doubt its independence and its non-susceptibility to influence or, as the case may be, the Acceptance committee should specify conditions on which the Slovak Rating Agency is able to draw up an independent rating.
In case of a positive result of judgement by the Acceptance committee, a contract is signed with the client.
The last stage of the preparatory process is creation of an analytical team by a senior analyst responsible for the area in which the given entity is active (financial area, non-financial area, municipality, projects, transactions).
The stage of rating process, Data collection, their analysis starts by sending a request for information so to the management of the given entity. In this stage, the Slovak Rating Agency is helpful to the client and, with the aim to provide for efficient data collection, requirements upon the kind of information necessary in the rating process and its structure are specialised in much detail.
After initial analysis of the data and information, results of the analysis are consulted with the client, while the data are verified especially from the point of view of testing consistency of separate data in outcomes. In this stage, emphasis is put on meeting the management of the given entity.
Conclusions of common meetings as well as all newly acquired information are processed, evaluated and judged in a comprehensive way by an analytical team. In this stage of the rating process, the first draft rating report is drawn up with a proposal for rating assessment. Internal approval and endorsement of the wording of the rating report is run in several degrees, thus making sure for a highly unbiased opinion on the company issuer from the perspective of granting an independent rating.
As far as the rating process itself lasts for a certain time period, the company /issuer should inform the Slovak Rating Agency in an formal manner about all significant changes occurred in the information entering the rating process during the processing and analysing the information or whether any new circumstances did not arise, which could affect the result of the rating assessment of the company.
Having processed possible comments specified within the internal approval of the results of analytical processes and possible new relevant information from the client, a draft rating report and draft rating assessment is submitted to be approved by the Rating committee.
The Rating committee is composed of well-known experts recognized by the market. The Rating committee is another component in the process securing independence and high level of expertise applied in the entire rating process.
Having approved the rating assessment or having incorporated and considered potential recommendations of the Rating committee's members into the final rating report, the result of rating assessment is notified to the client.
In the last stage of the rating process, the client may take a decision to get rating public or to treat it as not-public rating. Any client's decision is fully respected by the Agency, while all the data and information provided on the client are considered strictly confidential.
Each rating has to be monitored continuously. Monitoring process is run quarterly, while the Agency issues thereby from accurately structured updated data and information acquired from the client as well as from external, highly reliable databases.
Re-consideration of the rating takes place once a year, while updating of the rating is run in similar way, as it is in regular rating process.