Bringing a unique approach to understand the changing market environment: BMI Research

In today’s information economy, the management of financial information in a business is paramount in order to gain maximum operating results in a short span of time. One of the most efficient methods to effectively plan for success is to focus on breaking down organizational silos to address inefficiencies and optimise processes. Whether for operations, sales, marketing or other areas, the key is to understand how the business runs by capturing the relevant data, then modeling the critical processes. The data revealed through the financial statements help organizations to make decisions, plan strategies, determine success as well as estimate failures.

Therefore, organizations and their consumers have to rely on information providers and professional services firms who can accumulate and analyze financial data. BMI Research, a Fitch Group Company, does that and provides optimal financial planning and forecasts decisions and outcomes. BMI Research is a leading provider of macroeconomic and industry research, and analytics. For over 30 years, BMI has produced quality analysis and forecasts on macroeconomics, political risk, capital markets, and 22 industry sectors. Established in 1984, BMI became a part of Fitch Group in March 2014, expanding the group’s offering in financial information services.

Through a unique and highly integrated research methodology – Total Analysis – BMI delivers solutions that provide actionable investment strategies for corporate and financial institutions. BMI’s research methodology connects macroeconomic, political, and industry risk by combining comprehensive, proprietary 10-year forecasts, investment indices, and analysis for 200 developed, emerging, and frontier markets. This integrated approach allows their clients to be several places ahead and provides clients with data/insights that can hardly be found elsewhere, translating BMI’s innovative ideas into actionable client insights.

Connected Thinking for Macroeconomics, Industry and Political Risk

The world’s most renowned financial institutions, corporations and governments rely on BMI’s macroeconomic and political risk coverage, and breadth of industry data and analysis to inform their decision making. The company offers daily briefings, access to its expert analysts, monthly and quarterly reports, and a vast interactive forecast database, which allows users to pinpoint the size and expected performance of investment opportunities.

Recognised for its accuracy, BMI ranked in the Top 3 for 62 forecast categories in the 2017 Focus Economics forecast awards, including 21 Best Forecaster awards, placing BMI analysts fifth out of over 200 participating research houses and investment banks. In combining this multiple award-winning macroeconomic and politics data and analysis with advanced analytics, comprehensive fundamental data sets and innovative technologies, the company offers complete solutions and helps improve the financial and operational performance of its clients.

Solutions Designed to Optimise Diverse Data Consumption Models

BMI delivers 2.5 million lines of data and annual forecasts, updated continuously, to power the decision making of over 20,000 users worldwide. The company’s macroeconomic and political risk content is aggregated, enriched with Fitch’s proprietary content and relevant financial data, and delivered via Fitch Connect – a credit analytics platform – through a number of delivery channels, including desktop and enterprise applications. “Credit risk professionals are looking for solutions to help them assess risk and monitor their exposures effectively and efficiently. Fitch Connect combines robust data assets, advanced analytics and capabilities helping business users implement best-in-class processes to manage risk exposures”, said Ranjit Tinaikar, President of Fitch Information Services.

Fitch Information Services businesses have been consistently delivering innovation to its customers, placing an emphasis on data integrity and technology. In 2016, the company launched Fitch Connect with 60 users; today, the platform boasts more than 3,000 users. Throughout 2017, new integrated solutions will become available through Fitch Connect:

• Bank rankings is a proprietary bank ranking methodology that delivers insights into banks’ positioning on a global and country basis, providing a clear indication of a bank’s relative standing compared to peers, currently and through time.
• Curated news is an integrated solution providing news from over 6,000+ global sources on over 5,000 banks, available per entity and tailored to an individual analyst’s portfolio to deliver timely and relevant news used to proactively monitor existing exposure and inform credit decisions.
• Country Risk pages is a qualitative view of BMI’s macroeconomic data, forecasts and risk indices, featuring macroeconomic and political risk analysis for 163 countries globally, and covering 99.9% of global GDP.

“As our customers are shifting their focus on growth strategies, and the demand for timely data on macroeconomics, geopolitics, and banking dynamics has never been stronger. Our unparalleled offering in research, data and analytics, coupled with innovative technology allows us to deliver solutions that improve our customers’ financial and operational performance”, said Dr. Tinaikar.

Scenarios to Enable Improved Risk Monitoring

As part of this ongoing commitment to improving client experience and the client offering, the company is working on a new Banking Scenarios Toolkit. The monthly data and report product will measure the qualitative and quantitative impact of global macroeconomic shocks as defined by Fitch and BMI’s global economists, on the credit profile of emerging market banking sectors. The purpose is to help credit analysts quickly understand the impact of different macroeconomic outcomes on the creditworthiness of the banking sectors to which they are exposed. The interactive tool is designed to improve risk monitoring via the early identification of risk and by providing an understanding of how exposed different global banking sectors are to different economic and political scenarios. It represents an important new offering to credit analysts in an environment where performance is increasingly determined by hard to forecast political risk.

Knowing the leader behind BMI Research, Dr. Ranjit Tinaikar

Dr. Ranjit Tinaikar is President of Fitch Information Services. He oversees all of Fitch Information Services businesses including: Fitch Solutions and BMI Research. Dr. Tinaikar joined Fitch from Thomson Reuters, where since 2012 he was Managing Director and Global Head of Asset Management, Wealth Management, Investment Banking and Research. He led the transformation of that business by revamping its product delivery strategy to focus intensely on the needs of the customer.

Prior to Thomson Reuters, Dr. Tinaikar spent 14 years at McKinsey & Company where he was a Partner driving business performance improvement for financial services companies around the world. Previously he was a consultant with Deloitte. He began his career in 1991 with Citicorp information technology in Mumbai, and later taught management information systems at Carnegie Mellon.

“We are committed to building solutions around the needs of our customers, who are among the most sophisticated and ardent consumers of financial information.”