Institutional Risk Analytics, a unit of Lord, Whalen LLC, has added a new set of ratings displays to The IRA Bank Monitor in the regulatory CAMELS format. The acronym "CAMEL" refers to the five components of a bank's condition that are assessed: Capital adequacy, Asset quality, Management, Earnings, and Liquidity. A sixth component, a bank's Sensitivity to market risk, was added in 1997; hence the acronym was changed to CAMELS.

Ratings are assigned for each component in addition to the overall rating of a bank's financial condition. The ratings are assigned on a scale from 1 to 5. Banks with ratings of 1 or 2 are considered to present few, if any, supervisory concerns, while banks with ratings of 3, 4, or 5 present moderate to extreme degrees of supervisory concern. These ratings are highly confidential and are not released to the public.

Using data from the FDIC and the analytics in the IRA Bank Monitor, IRA has created a public data version of a CAMELS rating for all US banks. This benchmark is designed to help analysts, credit officers and institutional investors better understand the business model behavior of banks and how that profile changes over time. The CAMELS rating in The IRA Bank Monitor also provides a public data benchmark for regulatory analysis tasks.

IRA provides two versions of the IRA Bank Monitor to meet the needs of consumers and professionals. The consumer version of the IRA Bank Monitor may be accessed via our Bank Cart on our consumer portal (www.irabankratings.com). Institutional, commercial and government customers may access the professional version of the IRA Bank Monitor at (www.institutionalriskanalytics.com).

Questions? Comments? info@institutionalriskanalytics.com