Insights

The Competition for Africa’s Credit Architecture

S&P Global’s acquisition of Agusto & Co. is easy to read as another corporate transaction. It is more revealing to read it as a sign that the competition over Africa’s credit architecture is entering a new phase.

On 28 July 2026, S&P Global announced an agreement to acquire a majority stake in Agusto & Co., the Pan-African credit rating agency operating in Nigeria, Kenya, Rwanda and Ghana (S&P Global, 2026). Agusto will keep its own name, its own methodologies, and its own licences. S&P describes the move as an expansion of its domestic ratings presence on the continent (S&P Global, 2026).

From Mauritius #3: What If the Machine Is Better?

The question came near the end of the panel that I was on in the second day of the 2nd Annual Conference on Credit Ratings in Mauritius. I am paraphrasing, but it went roughly like this: given how quickly AI models are improving and how great artificial intelligence may become,

The Hierarchy of Evaluative Authority: Credit Rating Agencies and the Limits of Evaluative Autonomy

Executive Summary In the spring and summer of 2026, three of the world’s most consequential financial institutions found themselves on the receiving end of a contest usually reserved for the governments and companies they evaluate. On 22 April, twenty-three Republican state attorneys general wrote to Fitch, Moody’s

Who Decides What Creditworthiness Means?

Executive Summary Pedro Lange Machado’s 2026 paper argues that sovereign credit rating agencies embed a market-liberal theory of the state into the technical apparatus of creditworthiness, rewarding fiscal restraint and creditor protection while penalising the debt restructuring and public investment that climate adaptation requires. This essay accepts that

Read next