Credit risk management is a big deal at Corning Incorporated.With an accounts receivable portfolio in excess of $1.7 billion anda derivatives portfolio valued at more than $15 billion, thecompany faces significant exposures to both customers andcounterparties. To ensure that it understood those risks, theCorning treasury team was performing thorough credit reviews of allthe company's sizable trading partners. These reviews wereeffective at identifying vulnerabilities, but they weren'tefficient.

"It was a very manual process, with individual credit analystsspending a lot of time on each company," explains Stephen Fowler,director of liquidity and investment management for Corning. "Aprivate company with a very small market capitalization wouldreceive the same level of attention as a mega-cap company that wasalready being covered by credit analysts from S&P, Moody's, andfixed-income houses around Wall Street. We were looking at the samemetrics they were, we were just doing it in-house."