Кредитная политика компании и оценка кредитоспособности контрагентов

Nowadays, in a highly competitive environment, companies are forced to make concessions and create favorable conditions for customers to fight for their attention. One of the main conditions for customers are terms of payment. With regard to payment, companies create favorable conditions for their customers, granting them a deferred payment for a certain period of time with a certain size of credit limit. Deferred payment allows companies to pay their accounts to their suppliers after receiving funds from their core operations. Deferred payment in that sense is a kind of a loan provided by the company, which sells a good to the company, which buys this good. From the seller’s point of view, deferred payment is accounts payable on the Balance Sheet. According to the statistical data published on the official website of the Unified Interagency Information and Statistical System, the volume of overdue accounts receivable of all Russian companies over recent years is characterized by relatively stable growth. As of 01.01.2013, it was 1 224 705 mln RUB, as of 01.01.2017 – 2 240 920 mln RUB. Thus, over 5 years the amount of overdue accounts receivable increased almost in two times.
It is evident, that the company that provides the loan is interested in its full payment on time from the buyer’s side. The buyer, as a rule, is also interested in paying, because non-fulfillment of the contract entails litigation. What is more, the buyer is always interested in the longest deferred payment period, because in fact this type of a loan, taken from the supplier, is non-interest bearing and it allows to use money for free.
Thus, both parties are interested in the execution of the contract, however, in practice, the terms of the contract are often not met. The buyer may have a great desire to pay money to his supplier, but simply do not have funds because of financial difficulties. A company that provides loans to its customers is interested in keeping the number of firms, which are incapable of meeting their obligations, as low as possible. To do so, at the decision-making stage on granting a deferred payment, the client must be carefully checked for its creditworthiness. The creditworthiness of the borrower is its complex legal and economic characteristics, represented by financial and non-financial indicators, which allows assessing the possibility in the future and in the period provided for in the loan agreement to settle on debt obligations to the creditor.
Counterparties’ creditworthiness assessment is an important component of the credit policy of every successful organization nowadays, and for that reason this topic becomes more and more discussed in the literature. One of the first authors, who started discussing the problem of creditworthiness assessment was E. Altman. In 1968 he developed the index of creditworthiness, which still remains one of the most widely used in the world, despite the fact that this index was developed on financial information of only US companies. In general, there are so many creditworthiness assessment methods nowadays, that the problem of their classification becomes an important one. Vishnyakov I.V. in his paper «Methods and models for assessing the borrower’s creditworthiness» suggested dividing the methods of creditworthiness assessment into groups, and each group is also divided into subgroups. Further in the paper nearly all the methods will be studied and compared. However, one of the conclusions of their comparison should be mentioned right now. Almost all methods of creditworthiness assessment require large amount of input data – quantitative and qualitative information about company. Of course, large amount of input data leads to more precise results – this is a rule for nearly all types of analysis. However, nowadays it is the speed and ease of use of the creditworthiness assessment method that is important. Companies need to make a decision at high speed and cannot wait for results of long complicated analyzes. As a rule, before signing a deal, counterparty should send its financial information (Balance Sheets, Profit & Loss Statements) to the seller in order to be checked for creditworthiness, but very often there is a problem of insufficiency and unreliability of the information provided by companies. Information on the quantitative and qualitative characteristics of companies is very often deliberately or undemandingly distorted. Moreover, when analyzing small companies, arises the problem of the availability of information. Limitations of currently existing creditworthiness assessment methods create a request to develop a new method of creditworthiness assessment, which would be spared from the minuses of current models. Thus, we can now formulate the main goal of the paper.
The main goal of my thesis is to develop a new express method of counterparties’ creditworthiness assessment.
To achieve this goal the list of the following tasks should be executed:
• Analysis of existing methods of creditworthiness assessment;
• Justification for the need to develop a new method of creditworthiness assessment;
• Development of a new method of creditworthiness assessment;
• Verification of the method on real data and formulation of results;
• Comparison of the new method with currently existing methods and justification of its viability and possibility of use in practice.
The main research question can be identified as the following: «What is an alternative method of creditworthiness assessment previously never used».
The relevance of the paper is explained by the fact that counterparties’ creditworthiness assessment becomes more and more important component of a credit policy of every company. As it was previously mentioned, companies are trying to reduce risks associated with insolvency of customers. However, existing methods of counterparties’ creditworthiness assessment often require a large amount of input data or are extremely difficult to be developed. Managerial importance of the new method, offered in the paper, will be of high level due to this method ease of use and low need for company resources. Such a method is not used by companies nowadays and is not mentioned in the literature. In this regard, a study is relevant and can close currently existing practice gap.
The object of the study is the credit policy of a company. The subject of the study is the creditworthiness assessment of counterparties of a company. As research tools, the Black-Scholes option pricing model and Merton model for default probability are used.
Qualification paper has the following text structure:
• Chapter 1. CREDITWORTHINESS
In this chapter main methods of creditworthiness assessment are described. Methods are analyzed for their advantages and disadvantages. Justification for the need to develop a new method of creditworthiness assessment is presented.
• Chapter 2. MERTON MODEL FOR PROBABILITY OF DEFAULT
In this chapter a reader of the paper is introduced into the theory of options. Main principles and rules of options are shown. Merton model for default probability is described and analyzed in this chapter.
• Chapter 3. NEW METHOD OF CREDITWORTHINESS ASSESSMENT
The main aim of this chapter is to introduce a new method of creditworthiness assessment and verify it on real data. Data, provided by the real Russian company is analyzed and used in calculations in the model. After that results are given and conclusions on new model’s viability and practical applicability are formulated. In the end new method is compared to currently existing methods of creditworthiness assessment. New method’s ease of use and low need for company resources are distinguished as its main advantages in comparison with currently existing methods of creditworthiness assessment.