S&P and Veros Announce Strategic Alliance to Improve RMBS Transparency and Disclosure

NEW YORK, Oct. 28 /PRNewswire/ -- Standard & Poor's Fixed Income Risk Management Services (FIRMS), an analytics and research unit separate from S&P's ratings business, that delivers solutions to help investors perform greater analysis on the financial instruments in their portfolios, and Veros Real Estate Solutions, a leading provider of model-driven valuations on real property, today announced a strategic alliance aimed at providing the market with property valuation information specific to loans underlying residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS).

Fully understanding the loan-to-value ratio (LTV) of an underlying mortgage is one of the greatest challenges financial professionals face when they analyze mortgages and RMBS. Through this alliance, investors will have direct access to S&P loan level information as well as a wide range of collateral valuation data from Veros including current property value estimates, combined loan to value ratios and home price forecasts.

"The goal of this alliance is to provide RMBS investors worldwide greater clarity, transparency, and analytical capabilities when assessing the risk of their US RMBS holdings and their collateral" said David Goldstein, Managing Director at Standard & Poor's FIRMS. "This alliance is one more step toward improving the disclosure of information on collateral underlying RMBS, and refining the quality and integrity of information available to investors. The first stage in this strategic alliance will be to offer Veros loan level property information along with Standard & Poor's Global Data Solutions --U.S. RMBS Edition."

"Veros is very excited to be an integral part of Standard & Poor's efforts to provide greater loan level analytics to the non-agency market," said Darius Bozorgi, President and CEO of Veros. "The combination of Standard & Poor's FIRMS RMBS loan level data and analytics along with Veros' insightful property valuation data sets provides an unmatched unique offering for investors."

About Standard & Poor's Fixed Income Risk Management Services
Standard & Poor's Fixed Income Risk Management Services delivers a portfolio of products and services to investors that serve the global financial markets by providing market intelligence and analytic insight for risk driven investment analysis, including for the debt, structured finance, derivative and credit markets. Standard & Poor's Fixed Income Risk Management Services are performed separately from any other analytic activity of Standard & Poor's. The unit has no access to non- public information received by other units of Standard & Poor's. Standard & Poor's does not trade on its own account.

About Standard & Poor's
Standard & Poor's, a subsidiary of The McGraw-Hill Companies (NYSE: MHP), is the world's foremost provider of independent credit ratings, indices, risk evaluation, investment research and data. With offices in 23 countries and markets, Standard & Poor's is an essential part of the world's financial infrastructure and has played a leading role for more than 140 years in providing investors with the independent benchmarks they need to feel more confident about their investment and financial decisions. For more information, visit http://www.standardandpoors.com.

About Veros Real Estate Solutions
Veros Real Estate Solutions, a proven leader in enterprise risk management and collateral valuation services, uniquely combines the power of predictive technology, data analytics and industry expertise to deliver advanced automated decisioning solutions. Veros products and services, integrated into industry leading companies, are now optimizing millions of profitable decisions throughout the mortgage industry from loan origination through servicing and securitization. Veros provides solutions to control risk and increase profits including automated valuations, fraud and risk detection, portfolio analysis, forecasting, and next-generation collateral risk management platforms. Veros is headquartered in Santa Ana, Calif. For more information, visit http://www.veros.com or call Veros at (714) 415-6300.