Sebastien Cieniewski

Moody's Investors Service:
Moody's Investors Service is among the world’s most respected and widely utilized sources for credit ratings, research and risk analysis. Moody’s commitment and expertise contribute to stable, transparent and integrated financial markets, protecting the integrity of credit. In addition to our core ratings business, Moody’s provides research data and analytic tools for assessing credit risk, and publishes market-leading credit opinions, deal research and commentary, serving more than 9,300 customer accounts at some 2,400 institutions around the globe.

Credit ratings and research help investors analyze the credit risks associated with fixed-income securities. Such independent credit ratings and research also contribute to efficiencies in fixed-income markets and other obligations, such as insurance policies and derivative transactions, by providing credible and independent assessments of credit risk.

Customers include a wide range of corporate and governmental issuers of securities as well as institutional investors, depositors, creditors, investment banks, commercial banks, and other financial intermediaries.

My position:
Working in the Estimated Rating Team, I analyze various assets that are to be part of structured products such as Collateralized Loan Obligations (CLOs). These assets are of a particular nature as they are 90% of the time loans from banks to private equities in order for them to perform leveraged buy-outs (LBOs).

The particularity of the Estimated Rating Team is that we perform estimated ratings within a shorter period of time compared to the public ratings. Within usually a maximum of 5 working days, we are able to analyze the qualitative and quantitative position of a leveraged buy-out and assign a rating to the different tranches of the company's debt.

After the implementation of a specialization among analysts of the team, I have chosen to focus on 5 different industries: healthcare (private hospitals and medical products and devices), automotive (most of the time parts suppliers), chemicals, manufacturing, and leisure.