ICRA Brand Guidelines: A 1991 Indian Rating Agency, Moody’s Majority & a Gurugram HQ

An agency set up by Indian institutions.

ICRA was set up in 1991 as the Investment Information and Credit Rating Agency of India Limited, according to English Wikipedia, by financial and investment institutions, commercial banks and financial services companies, as an independent investment information and credit rating agency. It later changed its name to ICRA Limited, the initials of that original title. When Moody’s announced a share offer for the company in February 2014, it described ICRA as “established in 1991” and said that it worked through nine offices in India with a staff of more than 1,000, providing credit ratings and analysis as well as information and other professional services.

ICRA is headquartered in Gurugram, in the state of Haryana, English Wikipedia says. The company went public on 13 April 2007, with listings on the Bombay Stock Exchange and the National Stock Exchange of India.

Over time ICRA built a small group around the rating business. English Wikipedia lists, as of August 2020, ICRA Lanka, incorporated in December 2010 and licensed by the Securities and Exchange Commission of Sri Lanka in May 2011; ICRA Nepal, incorporated in November 2011 and licensed by the Securities Board of Nepal in October 2012, which the article calls Nepal’s first credit rating agency; and ICRA Analytics, formed in October 2019 by merging ICRA Online and ICRA Management Consulting Services, and offering analytics, risk management tools, market data, consulting and knowledge services.

The same article records two exits. ICRA pulled out of Indonesia, where it had run PT ICRA Indonesia, in June 2015; and in August 2016 it sold ICRA Techno Analytics to Nihilent Technologies, an IT consulting and services company based in Pune, which renamed the business Nihilent Analytics.

From minority partner to majority owner.

Moody’s has been part of ICRA’s story since the 1990s. Moody’s says it first bought an ownership stake in ICRA in 1998, and English Wikipedia describes ICRA as a joint venture between Moody’s and Indian commercial banks and financial services companies.

The step to control came in 2014. On 21 February 2014, Moody’s Corporation announced a conditional open offer for up to 2.65 million ICRA shares. The offer would go ahead only if enough shares were tendered to lift Moody’s holding from 28.5 percent to just over 50 percent; full acceptance would have taken it to about 55 percent. Moody’s chief executive said the offer reaffirmed the company’s “long-standing commitment to ICRA’s growth.” On 28 May 2014 Moody’s raised its offer price, calling the increase the “only and final revision,” and set the tender period from 3 to 16 June 2014. English Wikipedia gives Moody’s Corporation’s holding at the end of December 2024 as 51.86 percent, a majority stake, while ICRA itself remains listed in India.

ICRA has also faced regulatory action. The crisis at the infrastructure group IL&FS came to light in September 2018, and the Securities and Exchange Board of India examined how agencies had rated its debt. On 26 December 2019 a SEBI adjudicating officer issued an order against ICRA over its ratings of IL&FS non-convertible debentures and imposed a penalty under the SEBI Act. IANS reported that a similar order was issued against CARE Ratings, and that the order said there was no allegation of mala fide on the agencies’ part but called their failure “blameworthy and serious.”

SEBI then reviewed that order. On 22 September 2020, PTI reported, the regulator raised the penalties on ICRA and CARE, saying their lapses in rating the securities of IL&FS and its subsidiary IL&FS Financial Services had caused real financial loss to investors and had shaken investors’ faith in the reliability of credit ratings in the corporate debt market.

Ratings, research and analytics.

Credit rating agencies and financial data firms sell judgement and information, and most of what they publish is documents. A rating action is usually announced in a short notice naming the issuer, the grade and the outlook, followed by longer research reports and the methodology documents that explain how a grade was reached. Letter scales do much of the visual work: Fitch says it introduced its AAA, AA, A, BBB scale in 1924, and French Wikipedia notes that its long-term grades are very close to those of Standard & Poor’s, with plus and minus signs for the notches in between.

Regulation shapes that paperwork. In the United States, agencies can be registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission as Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organizations, the status that lets their ratings be used for regulatory purposes; in the European Union, the European Securities and Markets Authority supervises credit rating agencies and publishes its enforcement decisions as public notices. Disclosures, criteria and codes of conduct therefore sit beside the marketing pages on these firms’ websites.

Data products carry the brands to a wider audience. Agencies and research houses deliver ratings, research and data through subscription platforms and data feeds, and some lend their names to index families and fund ratings: Morningstar said in 2020 that it had worked with Sustainalytics since 2016 on a sustainability rating for funds and a global sustainability index family. Training arms, webinars and conferences add further outlets for the same research.

Against that volume of documents, the corporate mark is often just a name or a set of initials, repeated across reports, notices and dashboards. This guide sets out what can be checked about each firm — who founded it, who owns it and how it is regulated — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Initials carried across borders.

ICRA’s name works as a family name for its group. The Sri Lankan and Nepalese agencies carry it as ICRA Lanka and ICRA Nepal, and the analytics arm as ICRA Analytics, so the four letters travel across three markets and several lines of business, as English Wikipedia’s list of subsidiaries shows.

The initials also keep a trace of the founding brief. The original name joined two jobs, investment information and credit rating, and Moody’s 2014 description of ICRA still covered both: credit ratings and analysis on one side, information and other professional services on the other. ICRA Analytics continues the information side today, with market data, risk tools and consulting.

The comparison with Crisil is close. Both agencies were set up by Indian financial institutions within a few years of each other, Crisil in 1987 and ICRA in 1991; both are listed in India; and both came under the majority ownership of an American rating agency, Crisil under S&P in 2005 and ICRA under Moody’s, which first bought in during 1998 and moved to control through its 2014 offer. Crisil dropped its capitals in January 2025; ICRA still writes its name as four capital letters.

For a design guide, ICRA shows how a set of initials can carry one name across a group of agencies in several countries. Compare Moody’s, its majority owner, and Crisil, its closest Indian counterpart. For this guide we use indigo and a muted gold on a pale ground with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep ICRA’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.