EU probes Standard & Poor’s for monopoly abuse

BRUSSELS – EU regulators are investigating whether credit rating agency Standard & Poor’s broke monopoly abuse rules by forcing banks and investment funds to pay fees for using its identification codes, the EU said yesterday.

The European Commission said it believes S&P is abusing its role as the US national numbering agency by demanding that EU-based financial groups pay a fee each time they use an international securities identification number to access financial information from services such as Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg.
Standard & Poor’s runs the CUSIP Service Bureau for the American Bankers Association and is the only agency to receive firsthand information from all US securities issuers. It then licenses this information to market information services.
The EU executive said investors are being charged to access a database they don’t use and are paying for a code that is essential to their day-to-day business.
It said it has received complaints that S&P forces information providers to cut off banks and funds from data feeds on US securities unless they agree to pay S&P to use the codes.
The probe was triggered by complaints from associations representing financial institutions and asset managers, it said.
S&P’s main business rates the risk of corporate borrowers defaulting on loans. It is owned by McGraw-Hill Cos., a major educational publisher that also owns BusinessWeek magazine.
– Nampa-AP