Bangkok--8 May--Standard & Poor's In a report published today, Standard & Poor's Ratings Services announced that it will enhance its credit ratings process for nonfinancial companies through an enterprise risk management (ERM) review. The report, titled "Standard & Poor's To Apply Enterprise Risk Analysis To Corporate Ratings," is available on RatingsDirect. A teleconference to discuss the ERM review process and its implementation will be held on Friday, May 9, at 11 a.m. Call in information is at the end of this release. "We will begin to incorporate ERM into discussions with rated companies in the third quarter and begin to include commentary in our reports in the fourth quarter," said Steven Dreyer, managing director of corporate ratings in New York. "Ultimately, we will enhance transparency by providing investors and issuers our views of a management team's ability to understand, articulate, and successfully manage risk." "The benefits of the ERM enhancement will be to make the process of forming our rating opinions more forward looking, achieve finer differentiation among ratings, and facilitate construction of 'what if' forecast scenarios," Mr. Dreyer said. Mr. Dreyer said that the reviews will focus predominantly on risk-management culture and strategic risk management, two universally applicable aspects of ERM, and that no immediate rating changes are likely to result from the reviews. Standard & Poor's will defer formal scoring of companies' ERM capabilities (e.g., "strong," "adequate," "weak," etc.) until we have conducted a sufficient number of reviews to permit reliable benchmarking and published evaluation criteria, which is unlikely to occur before 2009. Credit ratings and rating outlooks would be affected in the meantime only if we observe extraordinary conditions that change our existing perception of a company's business profile. Standard & Poor's published a Request for Comment on its proposal to introduce ERM for nonfinancial companies in November 2007. Today's article explores the comments received and considered before implementation. Standard & Poor's will hold a telephone conference call on Friday, May 9, 2008, at 11:00 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time, to discuss the article. Speakers participating in this teleconference include Steve Dreyer, Practice Leader in Corporate Ratings and David Ingram, ERM Specialist. After prepared remarks, they will be available to answer questions. Please note that Standard & Poor's offers all of its broadcast teleconference calls to all interested participants on a complimentary basis. The call will begin promptly at the time indicated. Please call at least 15 minutes before the scheduled start of the call to complete the pre-call registration process.