Crisil is fundamentally an insights factory - it takes raw financial and market data and turns it into credit ratings, benchmarks, and risk analytics that banks, investors, and companies use to make decisions they cannot afford to get wrong. It began in 1987 as India’s first credit rating agency and has since expanded, step by step, into a global analytics company majority-owned by S&P Global, now serving more than 11,400 clients across 40 countries. The recurring pattern is this: build a dominant position in one information-intensive market, then use that expertise and cash flow to enter the next - from domestic ratings to global research, benchmarking, and risk solutions, each new engine fed by the credibility and capabilities of the ones before it.
Business segments
Four engines, each serving a different set of decision-makers - a domestic ratings franchise that is the company’s original moat, a captive analytical centre for its majority owner, and two global subscription-and-project businesses that sell intelligence to the world’s largest financial institutions.
1. Crisil Ratings: the credit gatekeeper for Indian debt
India’s largest and most preferred credit rating agency, earning a fee on every bond and bank loan it rates, with a default track record that competitors cannot match.
- Issuer-preferred brand - companies and banks actively choose Crisil Ratings over six other agencies because investors trust its ratings more, a preference that strengthened after the IL&FS default (which Crisil did not rate) made the market focus on rating quality.
- Best-in-class default record - its one-year investment-grade default rate, averaged over a decade, is the lowest among Indian rating agencies, and SEBI requires every agency to publish this statistic, so the comparison is public and direct.
- Two revenue streams, roughly balanced - it collects an initial fee when a rating contract is signed and a recurring surveillance fee for ongoing monitoring; the split has historically been around 50-50, with surveillance sometimes exceeding half.
- Pricing tied to debt size - rack rates are about 10 basis points of the debt amount for corporate bonds and 4 basis points for bank loan ratings, though actual yields are lower and capped for very large issuers.
- Scale and reach - it has rated more than 33,000 large and mid-scale corporates and financial institutions, graded over 150,000 MSMEs, and had 7,200-plus active credit ratings outstanding as of FY25.
2. Crisil Global Analytical Centre: the analytical engine room for S&P Global
A dedicated unit that acts as the largest data, analytics, and research partner for S&P Global Ratings, earning revenue under an arm’s-length agreement with its sole customer.
- Twenty-year partnership - it provides surveillance work delegation across all of S&P Global Ratings’ analytical practices, meaning S&P’s own analysts rely on Crisil’s team to monitor and update credit assessments.
- Beyond ratings - the centre has expanded into ESG diagnostics and evaluations, data and technology transformation programmes, and automation initiatives using machine learning and data sciences.
3. Crisil Intelligence: the data and research backbone for Indian finance
A subscription-and-project business that 90% of Indian banks consume, providing everything from credit scores on 60,000 companies to the indices that mutual funds use to build passive debt products.
- Platforms that banks run on - its Quantix platform covers more than 60,000 companies with financial and non-financial data, models, and outlooks, while Fulkrum adds Big Data analytics with natural-language querying and sentiment analysis.
- Indices as infrastructure - its fixed-income indices are the top choice for mutual funds launching sectoral passive target-maturity funds, with passive fixed-income assets tracking Crisil indices reaching roughly ₹39,500 crore.
- Full loan-life-cycle coverage - it serves banks from opportunity identification through origination, credit assessment, and risk monitoring, with 50-plus bank clients and 300-plus corporates.
- ESG ratings under licence - its step-down subsidiary holds a SEBI Category 1 ESG rating provider licence and scores most of India’s top 1,000 listed companies.
4. Crisil Coalition Greenwich: the scorekeeper for global investment banks
A subscription benchmarking business that tells the world’s top corporate and investment banks exactly how they rank against competitors - and then sells them the tools to improve.
- Quantitative meets qualitative - the legacy Coalition franchise provided hard-data benchmarking for investment banks; the 2020 acquisition of Greenwich Associates added qualitative survey-based insights and opened doors to asset managers and commercial banks.
- Multi-year subscription model - revenue is recognized over the contract term, and demand rises when market volatility increases because banks need more actionable intelligence to navigate uncertainty.
- The Q2 flagship - the combined Coalition-Greenwich offering gained material traction by cross-selling a larger suite to investment banks and entirely new products to non-CIBs such as asset management companies.
- Wealth management expansion - the 2025 acquisition of PriceMetrix added a proprietary database covering $8 trillion in assets under management and 30 million investment accounts, plus software tools that help wealth managers benchmark pricing and practice performance.
5. Crisil Integral IQ: the risk and regulatory outsourcer for global banks
A global provider of research, credit, and risk solutions that helps the world’s largest banks comply with ever-changing regulations and transform their risk operations.
- Regulation as a demand driver - banks must comply with frameworks like FRTB, CCAR, Basel IV, and IBOR transition, and CRISIL supported clients in meeting their IBOR, FRTB, and CCAR mandates.
- Sell-side and buy-side research - it is the world’s leading provider of equity and fixed-income research support to banks, while also serving asset managers with ESG integration and monitoring.
- Proprietary tools that won awards - its Scenario Expansion Manager, a centralized framework for regulatory and internal scenario analysis, won the Risk Markets Technology 2021 award for Best Modelling Innovation.
Group structure and partners
Crisil is majority-owned by S&P Global and operates through a web of wholly owned subsidiaries that separate its regulated ratings business from its global analytics engines, with a deliberate programme of simplification through mergers and closures.
- S&P Global control - S&P Global Inc. owns Crisil through a chain of holding companies, and the relationship is foundational: Crisil provides analytical support under a Master Services Agreement, and related-party sales to S&P Global entities represent 13% of total sales.
- Regulatory ring-fencing - the ratings business was carved into a separate wholly owned subsidiary, Crisil Ratings Limited, in December 2020 because SEBI mandated the segregation of ratings and non-ratings businesses; it has its own independent board.
- ESG subsidiary - Crisil ESG Ratings & Analytics Limited sits under Crisil Ratings Limited, holds a SEBI Category 1 ESG rating provider licence, and was a founding subscriber to the industry association for SEBI-registered ESG rating providers.
- International subsidiary chain - overseas operations are held through Crisil Irevna UK Limited and its subsidiaries in the US, Argentina, Poland, China, Australia, and Colombia, plus Crisil Canada Inc., which acquired Crisil PriceMetrix Co..
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