Opening a New Era with Machine Learning in Financial Services? Forecasting Corporate Credit Ratings Based on Annual Financial Statements

Corporate credit ratings provide multiple strategic, financial, and managerial benefits for decision-makers. Therefore, it is essential to have accurate and up-to-date ratings to continuously monitor companies’ financial situations when making financial credit decisions. Machine learning (ML)-based internal models can be used for the assessment of companies’ financial situations using annual statements. Particularly, it is necessary to check whether these ML models achieve better results compared to statistical methods. Due to the multi-class classification problem when forecasting corporate credit ratings, the development, monitoring, and maintenance of ML-based systems are more challenging compared to simple classifications. This problem becomes even more complex due to the required coordination with financial regulators (e.g., OECD, EBA, BaFin, etc.). Furthermore, the ML models must be updated regularly due to the periodic nature of annual statements as a dataset. To address the problem of the limited dataset, multiple sampling strategies and machine learning algorithms can be combined for accurate and up-to-date forecasting of credit ratings. This paper provides various implications for ML-based forecasting of credit ratings and presents an approach for combining sampling strategies and ML techniques. It also provides design recommendations for ML-based services in the finance industry on how to fulfill the existing regulations.