Moody’s withdraws African Bank’s ratings

Detailed summary

Bank retains its relationship with S&P Global Ratings.

This was confirmed by the New York-based rating agency in a statement.

The withdrawal includes the South African lender’s Ba2/NP long- and short-term deposit ratings, Ba1/NP long- and short-term Counterparty Risk Ratings (CRR), Ba1(cr)/NP(cr) long- and short-term Counterparty Risk (CR) assessments, and its b1 Baseline Credit Assessment (BCA) and b1 Adjusted BCA.

Moody’s National Scale Credit Ratings (NSRs) are a relative measures of creditworthiness among debt issues and issuers within a country, enabling market participants to better differentiate relative risks.

NSRs differ from Moody’s global scale credit ratings in that they are not globally comparable with the full universe of Moody’s rated entities, but only with NSRs for other rated debt issues and issuers within the same country.

“We have decided to withdraw the rating(s) following a review of the issuer’s request to withdraw its rating(s),” Moody’s said.

In a Sens nearly a week ago, African Bank announced it had moved to terminate its relationship with Moody’s.

Read: Fresh appointments to African Bank’s C-suite following executive departures

The bank still retains a rating agency relationship with S&P Global Ratings.

Earlier this year, the Prudential Authority also signalled plans to derecognise Moody’s Investors Service South Africa as an eligible external credit assessment institution.

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