AM BEST PUBLISHES REVISED CRITERIA PROCEDURE: ‘BEST’S NATIONAL SCALE RATINGS’

KUALA LUMPUR, June 16 (Bernama) -- Global credit rating agency, AM Best has released its revised criteria procedure, “Best’s National Scale Ratings” (NSR), effective immediately.

The revisions to the criteria procedure, formerly known as “AM Best’s Ratings on a National Scale”, include the introduction of NSRs for five countries namely Egypt, India, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam.

According to AM Best in a statement, these new NSRs will allow greater differentiation among insurance participants in their respective markets.

The mappings of the new tables from the global Issuer Credit Rating (ICR) to the NSR are included in the updated rating criteria. To denote the difference between a global ICR and an NSR, the NSR will have an “.XX” where XX represents a two-letter country code.

The NSR is a relative opinion of an insurance company’s financial strength within a single country. NSRs are constructed based on the financial characteristics of (re)insurers that are domiciled in the country, and to an extent, mitigate country-specific limiting factors in the global rating analysis.

In the final version of the revised criteria procedure, the rating agency has provided greater clarity on the nine factors used to determine the market characteristics for the NSR mapping.

Additional language has been included to accommodate different reporting standards across jurisdictions that may lead to the use of other financial metrics and definitions. The revisions to the NSR criteria do not impact any published credit ratings.

Published its request for comment related to NSR criteria procedure on Feb 28, with the comment period closing on March 28, AM Best received seven comments related to the NSRs during the public consultation period through the methodology in-box.

-- BERNAMA