(Asia) – In a wake up call to Asian bankers, Standard and Poor’s (S&P) have cited their lack of critical data in building Basel II compliant internal credit rating systems, needing to devote greater resources to credit data collection and validation.Asian banks lag behind their global peers according to S&P, with fully 80 percent of banks in a recent study holding less than three years of probability of default data, relative to 50 percent globally.
Given the timeliness and integrity of financial data in Asia is often questionable, qualitative data assumes greater importance than many other parts of the world but this need to be systematically stored and used by banks as a critical part of any risk management and internal credit rating process.